Beviev Tvacing Bicoeuv

AulIov|s) BudIe Andvev

Souvce Biacvilics, VoI. 30, No. 2 |Sunnev, 2000), pp. 43-69
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Diacritics.
http://www.jstor.org
TRACING RICOEUR
DUDLEY ANDREW
Frangois
Dosse. PAUL RICOEUR: LES SENS D'UNE VIE. Paris: La
Dicouverte,
1997.
[PR]
The Time
of
the Tortoise
Gilles Deleuze chose not to see the end of the
century
that Michel Foucault claimed
would be named after
him,
a
century
that
began just
as
philosophy registered
the
aftershocks caused
by
the work of his closest
progenitors,
Nietzsche and
Bergson.
Amplifying
the waves
they
made with
tempests
of his
own,
Deleuze tried to
capsize
the
flat-bottom boat of academic
philosophy by insisting
that it look
beyond
its own discourse
for both the life and the
vocabulary
to account for life that should be its
only
mission.
Scanning
French
philosophy
for what it
might
contribute to
art, fiction,
and
cinema,
I
invoke the
stirring
character of
Deleuze,
but I do so to deflect attention to another
figure,
Paul
Ricoeur,
whom Deleuze
conveniently
sets off
by
contrast.
Less than a decade since his
death,
Deleuze is in
danger
of
having
ceded his claim
to
Ricoeur,
the real
long-distance
runner,
who is now
pressing
his
publications
into the
new
century, moving relentlessly beyond
his exhausted reviewers. Last
year,
a fanfare
of
publicity greeted
La
mimoire,
l'histoire, l'oubli,
another
magisterial
tome
appearing
too late to be included in
Franqois
Dosse's intellectual
biography
or in
my
overview
here,
which lifts off from that
biography.
Ricoeur,
destined to
keep writing-unable
to
conclude his conversation with
philosophy-has
outlasted
Deleuze,
whose
notoriety
derives from the radical break he makes with the
thought
of our
times,
for his
abrupt
deviations and more
abrupt
conclusions. Ricoeur's
reputation
rests seldom on
anything
conclusive but instead on his
persistent
interaction with and
deployment
of so much of
that
thought. By
accident or
by savvy design,
Ricoeur's
trajectory (initiated
in the
phenomenological atmosphere
of the
prewar era)
has taken him
through myth criticism,
psychoanalysis,
structuralism, language philosophy, analytic philosophy, deconstruction,
poetics, historiography,
ethics,
and
epistemology.
He carries his
learning
forward to
each new
endeavor,
not
believing
in "the radical break" or the
prefix post-.
Franqois
Dosse tracks Ricoeur in a
magnificent
account that
places
its
subject
in
relation to each of these movements. But Parisian academic fashion forms
only
one
facet of a life whose brilliance is refracted as well
by theology, politics,
and a remarkable
social network. The thickness of his life
evidently provides
Ricoeur the
necessary
ballast
to maintain his orientation on the
stormy
seas of intellectual debate. In fact, across a
span
of
seventy years
of
uninterrupted reading
and
writing,
he has
anticipated, invoked,
or debated
virtually every important
school of French
thought, doing
so in a
way
that
both establishes their value and serves his own
agenda.
Ricoeur
profits
from the
productive
tension that results, even-indeed, especially-when
this
brings
about a
dislocation of his views. These
exchanges inevitably
leave his own ideas clearer, more
defensible, and invulnerable to
charges
of
parochialism. Although
Ricoeur concludes
his three-volume Time and Narrative with an
aggressive chapter explicitly asking,
diacritics / summer 2000 diacritics 30.2: 43-69 43
"Should We Renounce
Hegel?,"
there is
something deeply Hegelian
about this
strategy
of
taking on,
then
managing
to
assimilate,
all comers so as to
emerge stronger.
Ricoeur
may
not share
Hegel's
limitless
arrogance (literally arrogating everything
to
himself),
but his
humility
is
equally
ambitious.
There was never
any question
for Deleuze about
renouncing Hegel.
His
antipathy
to this
"philosophe
de
l'Etat"
was
immediate, total,
and itself
completely arrogant.
As
for
Ricoeur,
Deleuze
apparently
avoided the man Dosse dubs
"philosophe
de la
Cite,"
at least before 1986.
Then,
he links their names after each had
just published
a
multivolume treatise on
temporality
and
fabulation,
Deleuze's cinema books
picking up
the notion of "bifurcated time" that Ricoeur had
just developed
in Time and Narrative.
Proust was
explicitly
a
key
source for both of their studies. But
apparently,
and
outwardly,
it
gets
no closer than this. In
concatenating
these two French
philosophers,
I follow the
lead of Olivier
Mongin,
who finds them both to be
supreme philosophers
of
time,
yet
incompatible
on the basic
question
of mediation with
regard
to time
[Mongin 128].
Where Deleuze's books on the cinema
proclaim
the
immediacy
of
time,
Ricoeur insists
that time is unthinkable
except
as
mediated,
whether
through
fictional or historical
narrative.
Mongin opposes
Ricoeur and Deleuze
by distinguishing
the
objects they
respectively champion (the
rdcit and the
cinema),
but I
propose
to
drag
Ricoeur to the
cinema,
where he could have the effect of
cultivating
ideas about the film
image (indeed
the idea of
cinema)
that Deleuze sowed in the first
place.
In
doing
so,
I force a chemical
reaction that never
catalyzed
on its
own,
despite
the
proximity
of these
men,
who
certainly
must have met at the famous week with
Heidegger
in 1955 at
C6risy-la-Salle
[Dosse,
PR
418]
and when
they taught philosophy
in Paris thereafter.
The
cinema,
it turns
out,
opens
a historical context that
justifies,
if
only
in a
hypothetical way,
the
yoking
of such
divergent philosophical styles.
As a
budding
philosopher
and
cin6phile
in the late '40s and into the
'50s,
involved in a
complex way
with the
then-reigning phenomenological paradigm,
Deleuze must have
paid special
attention to Andre Bazin's
great essays
in
Esprit,
a
journal
whose
rapport
with
phenomenology
was
explicit,
and whose
guiding philosophical intelligence
was Paul
Ricoeur. Ricoeur was
only intermittently
in Paris
during
the decade after the
war;
nevertheless,
his close relation to
Esprit
would have
brought
him into contact with
Bazin,
who like him was a
disciple
of its charismatic editor Emmanuel Mounier.
Moreover,
Ricoeur had been led
by
Gabriel Marcel to think
philosophy through
art,
particularly
drama. With
Sartre,
Merleau-Ponty,
and
Amed6e
Ayfre writing
about cinema in these
years,
we should
expect
Ricoeur to have been
intrigued by
this
art,
which
was,
under
Bazin's
aegis, inflating
its ambitions to the limit. And so I am
permitted
to
imagine
a
lost
chapter
in Dosse's
biography.
It details the chance encounters
among
Ricoeur,
Deleuze,
and Bazin at the
Cin6matheque
Franqaise
or at Truffaut's
"Cin6-club
de la
salle noire." The "bifurcated
temporality"
that both Ricoeur and Deleuze
develop
in the
1980s Bazin
effectively
wrote about in his 1950 Orson
Welles,
the first auteur
study
I
know of. As much as the
pith
of
Proust,
the
complexly perspectival
world of Welles-
and of the modernist idea of cinema that flourished in
postwar
Paris-could have set
both Ricoeur and Deleuze on their
paths,
which would cross decades later on the
question
of
temporality.
Compared
to Deleuze, Ricoeur has
pursued
his
path
in a
"patient"
and
"long-
suffering" manner, two of his
many
virtues. These
complement
the beatitude that "The
meek shall inherit the earth," which can
just
as
easily
be read as a
slogan
for a crusade.
Meekly,
Ricoeur's
thought
has infiltrated numerous domains in the humanities and social
sciences, producing
a
high-minded,
sententious kind of resistance. To calculate the
impact
of his
workaday ethic, it is
enough
to note that Ricoeur directed the thesis or served as
mentor to Jean-Luc
Nancy, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Rancibre,
Vincent Descombes,
44
Jean-Franqois
Lyotard,
and Michel de Certeau
[PR 254-55]. He
has left his
mark,
and
more.
While the Protestant faith he has
steadfastly professed may
not have directed or
organized
his
strictly philosophical undertakings (a "philosophical
Christian" rather than
a "Christian
philosopher,"
he
circumspectly
calls
himself),
it has
decidedly
affected his
reception
in France and abroad. He was
ignored
for
years,
then vilified in
France--but
Christian intellectuals
throughout Europe
welcomed him. At his direst
moment,
after
the disaster he suffered at Nanterre in
1970,
he
accepted
a
three-year post
at the Catholic
University
of Louvain in
Belgium.
The crucial
rapport
that he has maintained with the
University
of
Chicago
dates from the same
period (teaching
in the
Divinity
School
rather than in the
department
of
philosophy,
from which he
always
felt alienated even
when
offering
for them
popular
seminars in Continental
thought).
In
Paris, by contrast,
Ricoeur endured the
contempt
of
prestigious peers
for
keeping religion
within the orbit
of his
concerns.
Pierre
Bourdieu,
Michel
Foucault,
and
Jacques
Lacan refused to take
him
seriously
or to
engage
in the
dialogue
he
always
invites. Their immense influence
turned
students
away
from
reading
him. He was taken to be a throwback to another
age
of
philosophy, addressing
an audience of
graying parishioners.
When he was forced to
resign
as dean of Nanterre
University
in
1970,
it was as if this view had been
officially
confirmed. At the same
moment,
Foucault
emerged
as a hero of the radical
youth
and
was elevated to a chair at the
College
de
France,
which he took in direct
competition
with Ricoeur
[PR 517-18].
But the
pendulum
has
swung
the other
way. English
readers have been able to
register
Ricoeur's
reemergence
in the
past
two decades
through
the instantaneous
translation of his
books,
the
appearance
of an
830-page compilation
of his
interchanges
with other
thinkers,
edited
by
Louis Hahn for the
Library
of
Living Philosophers
series,
and Charles E.
Reagan's
amiable Paul Ricoeur: His
Life
and His Work. In France Ricoeur
has been ever more
prominent
in the media and in
public exchanges
with
high-profile
peers
from the hard and social sciences.
Increasingly,
scholars in domains such as
history
and cinema studies have cited him. And then in 1997 came Dosse's
nearly 800-page
Paul Ricoeur: Les sens d'une vie. Dosse took on this
project following
his
indispensable
two-volume
History of
Structuralism.
Evidently
in
preparing
that
study
he encountered
Ricoeur
again
and
again
as someone at odds
with,
or to the side
of,
the dominant trends
in
postwar
French intellectual life
[Dosse interview]. Determining
to readdress the
period
through
Ricoeur
turns
out to have been not
only
a fair but an astute
decision,
for Ricoeur
gives
Dosse entr6e to traditions of
thought
that
precede
structuralism and
persist
after
it,
trends that Ricoeur has been at
pains
to
put
in
dialogue
with structuralism and its avatars.
Although
Dosse
may originally
have taken
up
Ricoeur as a convenience to round
out his
picture
of the
past half-century,
the man soon
emerges
in Dosse's book as
perhaps
its most
responsive
and
responsible
thinker. Given
enough
time and sufficient
occasions,
Ricoeur's
modesty
and
doggedness
have been rewarded even in a
country
that
prizes
ostentation and flair. This would be the
hagiographic explanation: Ricoeur,
philosopher
of
will,
has
triumphed by
sheer
"good
will,"
not
by
"the will to
power."
Dosse charts the
rise to
power
of Ricoeur's
goodness, finding
in his achievement of
continuity
an antidote
to the
discontinuity
of our
age.
But if Ricoeur has
managed
to
engage
intellectual fads
seriously, letting
his own ideas be inflected
by
the
signs
of the times, a more structural
rather than
biographical analysis
would examine
precisely
those
signs
and those times,
finding
it
logical
that the
general
malaise of French
thought
after
poststructuralism
and
particularly
in a
postcommunist period
should
provoke
a
return
to ethics (as in Emmanuel
Levinas).
From this
perspective,
what Dosse calls Ricoeur's "consecration" is
merely
another moment in the
self-propelled
movement of fashion, and this
biography
forms a
continuation, not the obverse, of his volumes on structuralism.
diacritics / summer 2000 45
Empathy
and
Biography
The
shape
and
style
of this
biography
emulate the ethos of its central character. Dosse
dubs Ricoeur "un
maitre
a
penser,"
someone who
unobtrusively
elicits and extends
thinking;
this,
to
distinguish
him
from
the lionized
"maitres penseurs"
of the last half-
century,
the fashion-model masterthinkers named
Lacan, Althusser, Derrida, Barthes,
Bourdieu,
et al.
[PR 600;
Dosse
interview].
The abundance of the book's research and
the
range
of
topics
addressed in its
seventy chapters try
to match Ricoeur's own drive to
be
comprehensive
in each of his studies and in their accumulated thrust. Where most
biographies
of intellectuals aim to account for the
development
of ideas in the events of
a
life,
Ricoeur's rather eventless life
tempts
Dosse to reverse the
direction,
explaining
the
person
as in fact a
product
of the ideas. As in one of Ricoeur's hermeneutic
studies,
Dosse feels
obliged
to take
seriously
each
position
Ricoeur has
encountered,
from the
empiricism
of his first
philosophy
teacher in
high
school to a more
sophisticated
form
of the same
philosophy
in the work of the
neurobiologist
Jean-Pierre
Changeux,
with
whom he
recently
debated
[Changeux
and
Ricoeur].
Although
he associates
mainly
with the
greats
in
philosophy, theology,
and
literature,
Ricoeur dismisses
personality
and
character,
dissolving biography
into a vast cultural
field of
reading
and discussion.
Personality
amounts to a
style
of
reading
and
interpretation,
a tailored
trajectory
of detours and
displacements
made in
passing
from
one
knotty
issue to
another,
always
in search of solid
ground.
But
personal identity,
like
ontology,
is an unfinished
project,
a
constantly receding
horizon that orients but does
not constitute a life. Dosse
accepts
Ricoeur's
belief--as
much an intellectual
position
as
a
private desire--that
the
subject
is best known
indirectly. Deciding
not to access Ricoeur
himself,
he
pursued
his work from the
outside,
interviewing
scores of those who have
known
him, reading
"Ricoeur the reader." And he has done so with the same
forthrightness
and
generosity
that characterize Ricoeur's
reading
and
writing.
No dramatic or secret
moments
bring
instant illumination to this life.
Nothing
is
hidden,
except,
of
course,
the
truth
itself,
which the life is ever in search of. Ricoeur's
strongest
ideas involve "narrative
identity,"
a fact that
prompts
Dosse to discover his
subject only through
encounters with
others,
in a drama of
decentering
and
contextualization,
as "Ricoeur"
expands
and
transforms his
thought,
his
concerns, and,
if we can use the contested
term,
"himself."
Dosse
adopts
Ricoeur's favored
posture: by maintaining
a
forthright yet
deflected
approach,
he arrives at a
second,
or
deliberated,
naivete. Other
biographers might
have
dwelt
psychoanalytically
on Ricoeur the
orphan
of World War
I, striving
to
grow
into
the father whom that war took from
him;
or on the
usurpation
of his life
by
an interminable
program
of academic labor.
(We
are told that he has the constitution to write twelve
hours a
day
on a routine
basis.)
But
Dosse,
except
in one
instance,
triangulates
the
personality
of his
subject, pinpointing
his relation to one thinker after another. The
exceptional
instance is the suicide of one of Ricoeur's five children in 1987. This
chapter,
titled "La traversee du mal
absolu,"
shows Ricoeur
grappling directly
with
something
he cannot assimilate to a
higher good
or to the order of
understanding.
This worst of
private tragedies changed
his
writing
and his
demeanor;
yet,
in Dosse's
account,
it made
him all the more
"himself," becoming
the
somber
impetus
behind his master
work,
published
in 1990, Soi-meme comme un autre
(Oneself
as
Another).
What makes Ricoeur's
trajectory
of
reading
and
interpretation
so worth
tracking?
"Philosophe
de la Cite," he exists as a
public intelligence
with the
public good
ever in
mind.
Rarely calling upon
arcane sources, Ricoeur returns to the tradition-from Plato
and Aristotle to
Heidegger
and Austin-to reorient mainstream
philosophy by protecting
it from extremes. And he has
consistently
made use of
philosophy
to
disentangle public
controversies and to
plead
for
responsible
action. Dosse's
long
book
lays
out one
46
intellectual,
political, religious,
or
pedagogical
situation after
another, locating
Ricoeur's
need to
respond,
and then
detailing
that
response through
excellent summaries of his
texts.
Along
the
way
we are treated to succinct reviews of the work of
major
writers
(Gabriel Marcel,
Karl
Barth,
Edmund
Husserl,
Dietrich
Bonhoeffer,
Claude
Levi-Strauss)
and of some
forgotten
ones as well
(the political philosopher
Andre
Philip,
for
instance,
or Ricoeur's rival in the
fifties,
Tran Duc Thao,
the brilliant Husserl scholar who left
Paris to
help
build a
government
in Hanoi
only
to
return,
after the Vietnam
War,
out of
favor, destitute,
and without a
country). Occasionally
Dosse
indulges
our taste for
gossip
of the
high
and the
mighty,
as when he details several
egregious
instances of Lacan's
unpardonably haughty
behavior toward the
ingenuous
Ricoeur. On the
whole, however,
Ricoeur's devotion to the
interplay
and also to the fair
play
of ideas diminishes
personal
and
professional
drama. Dosse is convinced
(and
he convinces
us)
that Ricoeur's
approach
to the life of the
mind,
to life
itself,
is
vigorously healthy. Regardless
of the
positions
he
has
upheld
over the
years (most
of
which,
in Dosse's
survey,
seem
apropos,
consistent,
and
liberating, though
seldom
brilliant),
his
selflessly
virtuous
attitude,
at once
passionate
and
reflective,
has had a salubrious effect in a world where
top
intellectuals seem more
often to behave like
politicians
and celebrities.
As a
public
intellectual,
Ricoeur is best defined
by
the situations into which he
inserted himself. Dosse
parses
his life into ten sections: the
1930s;
the
experience
of the
prisoner-of-war camp;
the
period
of reflection in the mountain
village
of
Chambon,
1946-48;
the
University
of
Strasbourg,
1948-56;
the nonconformist in the heart of the
Sorbonne, 1957-64; facing up
to the masters of
suspicion (Althusser, Lacan, Levi-Strauss,
Greimas), 1960-70;
the adventure of the
University
at
Nanterre, 1965-70;
eclipse
in
France and the detour
through
America, 1970-85;
recognition
and
triumph;
a
philosopher
in the Cite. Each section contains
chapters
that
highlight,
in
turn,
the
spheres
of Ricoeur's
concerns:
political
and
pedagogical
conflicts,
philosophical problems
and
challenges,
religious
and
theological
issues,
the extended
family
circle within which he has worked
and
lived; international contacts. His has been a life of
words,
those of ancient thinkers
he has drawn
on,
of current thinkers he has
promoted,
of courses he has
taught,
of
controversial
journal
articles he has
penned
or reacted
to,
of memorable lectures he has
given
and others he has attended. Over 1500 names show
up
in the
index,
a roster of
those whose ideas have mattered over the last
century,
and not
just
in France.
Indeed,
not
just
in France. Dosse makes us believe that of the
many
French
intellectuals who have struck
up
relations with one American
university
or
another,
Ricoeur has
profited
most from the
interchange.
His
years
at
Chicago
have altered the
way
he
gives
seminars in
Paris,
turning
them into
dynamic
sessions of
give-and-take,
rather than the
edifying
lectures that are the norm in the French
system.
Nor would his
recent books exist without the influence of
Anglo-American philosophy (Austin,
Strawson, Davidson, Parfitt,
and so
on).
More
recently,
he has left the door
open
for a
dialogue
with Asian
philosophers
and
religious thinkers,
wanting
ever to
multiply points
of view on
questions
of
Being.
Ricoeur does not
expect
the truth from
any
interlocutor,
each
necessarily
finite,
but he does
expect
to understand better whatever
questions
both
he and that interlocutor
(whether
ancient Greek or
contemporary Japanese)
have come
to address.
Ricoeur's hermeneutics constitutes a faith in the human
quest
for
Being,
as much
as a method for
understanding questions posed
of
Being.
In this Ricoeur
edges
close to
Bazin's
"Ontology,"
wherein
cinematography
allows us to access
reality,
but
only
from
shifting
and
always
finite
perspectives.
The art of
making
and
watching films, like the
practice
of
interpretation,
is a
discipline
of
establishing
and
multiplying perspectives
on
reality. Languages, styles,
and
ideologies
mix and clash, yet according
to these men,
they
do so over issues that stretch before and
beyond
all views.
diacritics / summer 2000 47
Ricoeur
puts divergent
views to
work,
setting
them one
against
the
other,
charting
a route from one
problematic
to the
next,
as he
keeps
the
dialogue
of
philosophy moving
forward. And so one finds in Dosse's
biography-and
then
supremely throughout
Ricoeur's
oeuvre--exceptionally
clear
recapitulations
of
key
issues in
Husserl, Freud,
Althusser, Greimas, Derrida,
and
many
others. But Ricoeur is no
encyclopedist.
He
needs to cut
cleanly
to the center of the
positions
involved because his own
position
encompasses
the
dialogue
between,
say, phenomenology
and structuralism or between
semiotics and the
theory
of reference. His hermeneutics defines itself as a method to
break
through
the limits of
positions
and vocabularies.
Something
more,
something
potentially liberating,
becomes available to the
understanding
when vocabularies brush
up against
one another.
Sometimes,
as in
metaphor,
one field is
helpfully
redescribed
by
a
foreign vocabulary (for example, mythology newly
understood in the
language
of
structural
linguistics);
sometimes two vocabularies
open
onto a domain that neither
could access alone
(historiography
and
narratology allowing
a
conception
of "narrative
identity").
Ricoeur has had to counter insinuations of eclecticism. He would call his
displays
of erudition
strategic; they
allow him either to
triangulate
his own
emerging
views or
(to
use his definition of
metaphor)
to
remap
a
philosophical problem entirely,
allowing
it to come into view in an
entirely
new
way.
Situations and
Trajectories
Ricoeur's
piety
before
great
thinkers and his taste for abstract ideas were
undoubtedly
abetted
by
the sermons he was asked each
Sunday
to meditate on. While he
dutifully
pursued high
school and
undergraduate philosophy
courses,
his nascent social and
religious imagination
was
ignited by
the vibrant "non-conformism" of 1930s France.
Extracurricular
philosophy
for Ricoeur included
Bergson
on one side and the faddish
German
philosophers
on the other
(Nietzsche,
to be
sure,
followed
by
Husserl,
Heidegger,
and the return of
Hegel
via Alexandre
Kojeve's
much-discussed
courses).
Where Deleuze
would resuscitate the
Bergson
and Nietzsche of the 1890s with the two wonderful books
he wrote in the
1960s,
Ricoeur encountered
Bergson
as
virtually
a
contemporary,
indeed
as the author of Les deux sources de la morale et de la
religion,
a best-seller when he
read it in 1932. Ricoeur at nineteen was
just finishing
his baccalaureate at
Rennes,
under a Neo-Thomist who
pushed
him to read the canon
systematically
and with
rigor,
and for whom
Bergson, despite having
moved toward
Catholicism,
was forbidden fruit.
In
any
case,
Bergson's day
had
passed
with the Great
War;
his
popularity
was with the
public,
not with those who
taught
and studied at the Sorbonne.
Although
Ricoeur did
not
directly study Bergson, many
in his circle had felt his
influence;
and he could
only
be
impressed
with a
philosophy
that dealt with
pressing problems
in an
engaged, decidedly
nonscholastic
style. Philosophy
could,
in
short,
be alive. Ricoeur set off from Rennes in
search of this
life,
first
by moving
to
Paris,
and then
by looking
outside the academic
environment dominated there
by
the
lucubratory
neo-Kantian Leon
Bruschwicg,
with
whom he wrote a master's thesis.
In Paris, Ricoeur found the
vivacity
he was
looking
for in Gabriel Marcel, whose
renowned
"Fridays"
he
assiduously
attended as an antidote to his courses at the Sorbonne.
Refreshingly unacademic, Marcel insisted that his salons be free of the
weight
of
philosophical authority
and that
they
deal with matters of existence, not method. Year
after
year, political, social, religious,
and aesthetic issues were
presented by
the
participants
who
thought
them
through
without the
support
or clarification of canonical
formulations. Sartre and Levinas were
among
those who attended from time to time,
doubtless
shaking things up
with the Husserl and
Heidegger they
had studied in
Germany.
48
(Sartre
would
always
disdain Marcel for his conversion to
Catholicism,
and
perhaps
because he had
preceded
him as a successful
playwright.) Young
activists came as
well,
full of the
fiery
discourse
erupting
each month in such
upstart journals
as Ordre
nouveau,
Presences,
and
Reaction.
Marcel
encouraged
nonconformist
thought-in-action;
and in
the freedom and moral seriousness of this
fellowship
Ricoeur
presented
his first
genuinely
personal disquisition,
"Justice,"
a
topic
on which he continues to write to this
day.
In the cauldron of the
Popular
Front
era,
the
young
Ricoeur could
speak
of
justice
as more than a
philosophical
issue.
Calvinist,
he
argued against
Karl Barth's Lutheranism
that
Christianity
must
transform,
not turn its back
on,
the world. Transformation should
move from reflection to
action,
he wrote in Hic et
nunc,
one of the short-lived leftist
journals
on whose
edges
he hovered
during
the entire decade. A Protestant
organ published
out of Andre Gide's
apartment,
where Denis de
Rougemont,
one of its
directors,
was
living
in
1936,
Hic et nunc meant to serve as a site for intellectual
transformation,
like
the more radical ETRE and Terre nouvelle. The
latter,
"a
journal
of
revolutionary
Christianity," sported
a cross as well as a hammer and sickle on its
cover,
and so was
condemned
by
the Vatican and Moscow alike. In one of its issues Ricoeur
proclaimed
himself a
pacifist
who nonetheless must advocate intervention of the international left
on behalf of
Republican Spain.
In these
complex days
he drew closest to
Esprit (founded
in
1932), establishing
a
relationship
with Emmanuel Mounier that would flourish after
the war. Mounier
represented something
like Marcel in action.
But it was not
just
the
pressing politics
of the
day
that
pushed
Ricoeur
beyond
those
cozy Fridays
at Marcel's
apartment.
His commitment to the act of
reading
led him to
distrust the
primacy
of
personal
reflection that Marcel
persistently
advocated. The two
retained
great
affection for each
other,
however. Marcel was the first
person
to
greet
Ricoeur
upon
his return from
captivity
in
1945,
and it is to Marcel that in 1950 Ricoeur
dedicated the first volume of his own
philosophy,
Freedom and Nature. In the late
'60s
they published
a
wonderful
book
together, Tragic
Wisdom and
Beyond.
On the surface
a set of radio interviews of Marcel
by
Ricoeur,
in fact this book constitutes a
sympathetic
and
productive dialogue, dialogue being
the cast of
thought
and
speech they mutually
uphold
as
primary.
Dialogue
clarifies differences and filiations. While Ricoeur worries that Marcel
can be
charged
with murkiness and lack of
method,
no one can
question
his
courage
to
face
philosophy
bare-handed. The twin
topics
Marcel introduced in the second
part
of
his
path-breaking
Journal
mitaphysique,
and then
pursued
in later
studies,
"The
Mystery
of
Being"
and "Incarnated
Thought,"
are scattered
throughout
Ricoeur's books and
become the focus of his
essay
on Marcel written in 1984
[Lectures
2
50-53].
Ricoeur
has tried to answer to the
depth
of both
mystery
and
body,
but in a
way
that sheds on
them the
brightest possible light, something
Marcel,
a man of music and literature as
much as a
philosopher,
never cared to do. Marcel's existential
phenomenology grows
out of his
experience
with
art,
which he felt could tell us more than
pure philosophical
analysis
about the
topics
that mattered to
him,
such as
"identity."
In
"Bergonism
and
Music,"
he described the
"figure
of the theme" as
welling up
from an
anonymous past
in the music listener who intuits it and
"recognizes"
its
aptness.
Marcel describes this
quasi-past
as "not
any particular
section of a historical
becoming,
more or less
explicitly
assimilated to a movement in
space,
such as a film
sequence.
It is rather the inner
depths
of oneself . .. sentimental
perspectives according
to which life can be relived not as a
series of events but to the extent that it is an indivisible
unity
which can
only
be
apprehended
as such
through
art"
["Bergsonism
and Music" 149].
Ricoeur's later ideas, particularly
on
"living metaphor"
and "narrative
identity,"
can be seen in
germ
here in Marcel's ideas: a
composer
and his hearers encounter each
other in the
figure
of a musical theme which satisfies an
expectation
that is discovered
diacritics / summer 2000 49
only
in the
hearing
of it. This
"anonymous past,
colored
by personal
nuance" characterizes
not
only
our
response
to music but our relation to culture
generally.
We are born not to
create
meaning
from the isolated
point
of our existence
(Sartre, Descartes);
we are born
already belonging
to
meanings
that we
gradually
discover,
recognize, modify,
make our
own in
returning
to. Marcel shared with Sartre the sense of the essential risk of
subjectivity,
its
insubstantiality,
but Marcel's faith waited in the
expectation
that this
risk would
reap
dividends of
authenticity upon
its maturation. Never self-confident in
its
being,
a self nevertheless can
proceed confidently
on a road called
genuineness,
whose final destination remains ever the road: Homo viator.
Dosse
picks up
an echo of homo viator in his
subtitle,
for Les sens d'une vie
characterizes its
subject,
Ricoeur,
as
engaging meanings ("sens")
but
only
as someone
whose
thought
is en route. Like
Marcel,
Ricoeur holds no doctrine but follows a direction
("sens")
with a distinct
trajectory
and
continuity.
And
yet
one can
precisely plot every
zigzag,
detour,
and sudden
breakthrough
of his
journey,
since these all take
place
on the
immense
map
of
philosophy
with whose coordinates
he,
far more than
Marcel,
orients
himself. When faced with a
problem,
Ricoeur's characteristic first movement is
backwards,
"retreat." This term bears a
prominent pedigree,
Ricoeur
adopting
it from
Gabriel
Marcel,
who was ever
suspicious
of
progressivism, positivism,
scientism,
dialectical
Hegelianism.
Marcel counseled retreat when faced with a
"mystery,"
a
conundrum in which one is
intimately
involved
(unlike
a mere
"problem"
to be
solved).
In
pulling
back within the
self,
in a mood of
recollection,
one can scan the inner
landscape,
including
one's
resources,
heritage,
and
situation,
not to mention
one's affections,
before
leaping
forward in a calculated risk of
thought.
Marcel's dramatic and
highly personal
manner of
doing philosophy
is bolstered
by
a French tradition one can trace to
Montaigne
and Pascal. His modern
progenitor,
however,
is Maine de
Biran,who
at the outset of the nineteenth
century
initiated a
style
of
personal thought
from the literal retreat
that,
as a
nobleman,
he was forced to make
during
the French Revolution. Marcel's Journal
mitaphysique
takes its cue from Maine
de Biran's Journal
intime,
a sustained reflection on the inner
life,
beginning
at what he
thought
was the
beginning:
the sensations of the
body responding
to an exterior field of
objects
and other selves
[see Gouhier].
After a
generation
of the determinism of the
French
philosophes,
Maine's
recovery
of free will within the material world
(enacted
through corporeal powers
of vision and
movement)
set the
stage
for
Bergson's subsequent
elaboration of the
topic
at the end of the
century
in Matter and
Memory.
Bergson's great
book,
which Deleuze
championed
all his
life,
which Marcel was
beholden to
(he
dedicated his Journal
mitaphysique
to
Bergson),
and which Ricoeur
contritely agrees
is a
masterpiece
he has
yet adequately
to address
[Ricoeur, Azouvi,
and
Launay 188-89],
couches the existential human drama in
proto-scientific
terms.
Bergson
alternates between neuroscientist and reflective
philosopher, taking
both
parts,
as it
were,
in the same sort of
dialogue
Ricoeur and
Changeux
would
exchange
a
century
later
[see Changeux
and
Ricoeur].
He doesn't shrink from
describing
the human brain
as a
relay
between sensation and
action,
but
crucially
he adds that this
relay
works with
a built-in
delay [Matter
and
Memory 30].
Consciousness-reflection-takes
place
in
and as this
delay
when,
faced with some situation in the
present, layers
within a volume
of
memory
are traversed and
sampled
before the
organism adjusts
its stance and reacts
to face the future. Marcel was struck
by
this
image
of consciousness as time
spent
in a
memory
vault. He conceived of this vault, as did
Bergson
and Maine de Biran, in
personal
terms, the self as
unplumbed
volume of
depth. Ricoeur, who cites Marcel, Husserl,
and
Maine de Biran as
key
influences on the same
page
of his "Intellectual
Autobiography"
[Hahn 12], would likely characterize this "vault" as some sort of library, full of "volumes,"
whose ideas, sentiments, and positions shuffle in constant interplay and to which we
50
turn when
conning experience.
Libraries form second lines of retreat when inner resources
fail and we must think further and otherwise. Unlike
Marcel,
Ricoeur accorded direct
interior reflection little credit. How
quick
he is to burrow into the further recesses of the
library
and from there into the
meandering
ideas of individual volumes. As he
puts
it,
hermeneutic distanciation is a variant of Husserl's
phenomenological epoch6 [Riflexion
faite 58],
a
way
to achieve
clarity
and to
depersonalize
immediate
experience.
The value and
practice
of
retreat,
surely ingrained early
on in his
religious
education
and then in his formative discussions with
Marcel,
became Ricoeur's
defacto
mode of
existence
during
the 1940s. So too did the German
language
and German
philosophy,
which he had
begun systematically
to
study
after 1936. For Ricoeur was
captured
in
1940 and
sequestered
in a
prison camp
in Poland for the duration of the war.
Miraculously,
he found himself incarcerated with other
intellectuals,
including
Mikel
Dufrenne,
the
Kantian
phenomenologist
who would remain a
lifelong
friend. Dosse
paints
a vivid
picture
of this odd
refuge
of
philosophy, supported by
a modest
library
of donated books
that included the
complete
works of Karl
Jaspers
and the Ideen of Husserl. Ricoeur
made an interlinear translation of the
latter,
while he and Dufrenne
systematically
went
through
the
Jaspers, preparing
a coauthored
study
that would come out in 1948.
They
perfected
their German and
improvised
lectures,
Ricoeur
extemporizing
on Nietzsche
without notes at one memorable session. Once
released,
rather than throw himself like
most of his
contemporaries
into the work of
reconstructing
France's cultural
institutions,
he took his
family
to the mountain
village
of
Chambon,
which had been a literal
refuge
for Jewish children
during
the war. Invited to teach in this
idyllic community by
Andre
Phillip,
the charismatic social activist whom he had known in Protestant circles in the
'30s,
he
effectively opted
out of the
postwar struggles
for cultural
power.
Ricoeur in the
mountains,
like Christ in the
desert,
tested himself and his ideas in
complete
isolation.
Subsisting
on
very
little for three cold
years,
he used this "haut lieu de retraite" to finish
his doctoral
thesis,
his Husserl
translation,
and the
Jaspers
book
(when
Dufrenne came
to
visit).
He also tried out on
very young
students the courses he would soon
give
at his
first
university post
in
Strasbourg.
Ricoeur
brought
to
Strasbourg
a certain brand of French
postwar
existentialism,
especially
that of Marcel and
Merleau-Ponty,
which he bolstered with the more
rigorous
phenomenology
of Husserl.
Beyond
Ideen and Husserl's other
published books,
Ricoeur
could now
study
thousands and thousands of
pages
of the master's notes
just
uncovered
in a
Belgian
archive. Ricoeur staked his claim to become their
principal
overseer,
a
position
he would inherit from
Merleau-Ponty.
This was more than academic curatorial
work,
for Husserl's
"particularism"
formed the mentalist obverse of Marcel's carnal
approach.
While Ricoeur would
ultimately recognize
how different were the
phenomenologies they practiced, they equally
contributed to
founding
a
conception
of
"the
person."
Crucial here is Husserl's
doggedness
in
filling
the interstitial zone between
intention and sheer sensation. When
supplemented by
his
Phenomenology of
Internal
Time
Consciousness,
this zone in effect becomes for Husserl the site of the
person,
including style
and
continuity.
Ricoeur understood Husserl's abstract formulations to underlie the
personal
and
political
ideas
(he
could
not term it
"philosophy")
of
Mounier,
without the
latter's
realizing
it. In
chapter
five of his
summary
book of 1946, Qu'est ce
que
le
personnalisme?,
Mounier calls on Marcel, Jaspers, Kierkegaard,
and Maine de Biran to
help
him account
for the double alienation
afflicting
modern human
beings (from the world and from
other
people) [see Mounier]. Ricoeur
grew very
close to Mounier
just
before the latter's
death in 1950 while Ricoeur was
translating
Husserl's Ideen.
Evidently
Mounier
hoped
to recruit a
heavy-hitting philosopher,
as he
might
a
lawyer,
to validate his social
movement in the
eyes
of the academic court. In a most
happy moment, Ricoeur
diacritics / summer 2000 51
contributed his abstract intellectual work
(on
Husserl
and
Marcel)
to the social reach of
Personalism and its
journal, Esprit,
for which he
began
to write
regularly
and where he
found,
as Dosse
puts
it,
a "collective intellectual
identity
of a
community
of
hope" [PR
57].
As with
Marcel,
Ricoeur believed he had to
step beyond
Husserl,
but never
beyond
Husserl's desire to
grasp
life at its immediate
points
of contact.
Modest,
Ricoeur doubted
that he
(or anyone)
could fulfill this desire unaided. In
fact,
contra Marcel and contra
Husserl,
he
readily
declared the need for
precedent
formulations,
not so much to lean on
as to think with into the future. And
so,
although
his
philosophy
is
suspended
between
the
quest (modernist
and
Husserlian)
to build
things up
anew and a belief
(more
traditional)
that mankind has ever confronted the selfsame
problem
of
remembering
existence-a
problem
Marcel
encouraged everyone
to
pose
as
though
for the
very
first
time-Ricoeur has formalized what
appears
a most standard
philosophical practice,
that of
reading
and
interpreting
earlier
philosophers.
Hermeneutics names the
practice
he would
eventually adopt
to mediate
problems
that have been
deliberately posed by
phenomenology
as immediate. Hermeneutic
phenomenology,
at first an
oxymoron,
comes
to stand for contact with existence that is
culturally
shared before
being
taken as
personal.
Ricoeur
enlarges
the
temporality
at the heart of
phenomenology beyond
the
subject,
until it stretches across centuries on the
wings
of
interpretation,
while
remaining
authentically
human. This
aspiration
he shares with
Gadamer,
though
he
invariably
turns
toward the future and toward
action,
whereas Gadamer's constant concern is with tradition
and the
past.
The built-in cultural dimension of Ricoeur's
philosophical program
fits
perfectly
a
personality
that thrives on
dialogue
and social
concern.
At
Strasbourg
from 1948 to
1956 he
enjoyed
fertile interaction with a close-knit
group
of
colleagues
and
students,
in both
philosophy
and
theology.
He treasured
good
conversation about serious
topics
in the
classroom,
in the
extremely
active
Esprit study group,
and in his
religious
congregation. Building
on the reservoir of
reading
notes and ideas accumulated
during
his isolation in the
1940s,
his courses
grew
in
reputation
and
variety,
as did his
publications.
Called to the Sorbonne in
1957,
he would leave forever the conventional
satisfactions of
provincial university
life for a far more
consequential public
arena.
In
Paris,
as Dosse recounts
it,
Ricoeur could not
help
but become involved in
contemporary
social issues discussed in the
journals
he
kept up
with. He arrived at the
Sorbonne after
having just
lobbed into the
public sphere
three
pieces
on the
response
of
the West to
China,
which Dosse finds feeble but which indicate a new sense of
responsibility
to the
larger
world of
politics.
Almost
immediately
came the
Hungarian
uprising
that
split
the left over
Stalin;
hardly
had this storm diminished than the brutal
debate over
Algeria
escalated. Ricoeur took an immediate and
forthright
stand
against
colonization;
he found himself
questioned by
the
police
for
hiding
soldiers
deserting
from that war. His name could be found on
petitions,
in
theological
debates,
and on the
pages
of a
range
of
journals.
His
bibliography
shows a
surprising
number of addresses
concerning topics
as diverse as
science,
youth,
internment
camps,
communism,
and
Zionism
[Hahn 646-53].
In all this
Esprit
felt like his home; for there, in the
spirit
of a Personalism imbibed
through Husserl, Marcel, and Mounier, he could write without condescension on matters
at once
philosophical
and
directly political.
So
closely
did he
identify
with its
principles
that in the late 1950s he would be
thought
of as the next director, Protestant
though
he
was.
Esprit literally
became his home in 1957 when he moved into Les Murs Blancs in
Chatenay-Malebray just
to the south of Paris. Mounier had
bought
this
lovely property
with its three
buildings
in 1939 and shared it with other Personalists. Even after a 1957
shake-up
in editorial direction, Chatenay-Malebray
maintained itself as a
unique
52
-AV
nk-R. i-
.,.14
AK,
::?
s~i~'7
intellectual and moral
community.
Dosse describes with
envy
an ambience of
generosity
sufficiently utopian
to
quiet
the occasional conflicts of
position
and
personality
that
inevitably
arose
among
the
men, women,
and dozen children who lived there in close
companionship.
Chatenay-Malebray effectively
served as the editorial
headquarters
for
Esprit,
where
friends and
adherents,
often more than
fifty strong, regularly gathered
to
plan-and
to
exchange
views
on-topics
the
journal
had decided to feature. Ricoeur's views
invariably
put
him on the left even
by Esprit's
standards. In 1960 he took it
upon
himself to
organize
an issue of the
journal
devoted to sexual
mores,
in order to
bring Esprit
into contact with
contemporary
concerns and with a
changing society.
But it was his
grasp
of the conundrum
posed by
the Soviet Union as
putative
leader of world socialism that
gained
Ricoeur the
greatest respect.
In the
May
1957 issue of
Esprit
his "Le
paradoxe politique" appeared,
an
essay
that even
today
draws
praise
for its
independence
and breadth. As usual he
lined
up
extremists on both sides
(Hegel
on the side of the
state,
Marx on that of distrust
or
resentment), insisting
that both be
given
their due in a
synthetic political
stance.
More
heretically,
he chided Marx for
having
left
politics
out of his 100
percent
socioeconomic
analysis.
This lacuna
permitted anyone (Lenin
and
Stalin,
as it turned
out)
to
develop every
sort of
political
mechanism in the name of
furthering
Marx's
goals, including
the
military oppression
of
Hungary
in the current instance
[Ricoeur,
Azouvi,
and
Launay 95]. Elaborating
ideas Hannah Arendt was
making
famous at
just
this time
(he
would write the
preface
for the French translation of The Human
Condition),
Ricoeur
distinguishes power,
exercised
vertically by
strata and associated with
evil,
from
politics,
a horizontal
practice
associated with
"being together."
He could not
countenance the
paternalism
of the USSR at the time but
adamantly
refused the lure of
so-called American
democracy
saturated with commercialism. While he
practiced
precisely
the Personalism that was the
legacy
of
Esprit
from the 1930s
on,
he
developed
a
philosophical vocabulary
to
justify
this "third
way."
This
period
of activism subsided in the '60s as Ricoeur found himself
engaged
in
all-consuming
academic debates and in the internal
politics
of the
University
of Paris.
Quite unfairly
he became linked to the
establishment,
despite
his
quite progressive
ideas.
Anyone
who believed in institutions
(and
Ricoeur believes in their inevitable
importance
as well as their
imperfection)
was
suspect.
More than one former
intransigent
radical
who had loathed Ricoeur in the
days
of the seizure of Nanterre later came to
appreciate,
indeed to
revere,
him after
rereading
his
many
social
essays [PR 601].
Ricoeur's
consistently thoughtful
leftism,
and the action he has
personally
taken or
supported
in
the face of a
range
of social
causes,
gain compound
interest each
year
until its worth
stacks
up
well
against
the now devalued rhetoric of the
blustery
firebrands of 1968.
Since Dosse was schooled in that
generation,
Paul Ricoeur: Les sens d'une vie has the
air of a
penance expiating
the
arrogance
of an earlier
period.
This shift in the tone of
academic discourse can be measured
by
the
ascendancy
of Emmanuel
Levinas,
whose
reputation surely helped
resuscitate the
prominence
of his friend and
colleague
Paul
Ricoeur. From the 1930s to the end of the
century,
both men submitted German
phenomenology (Husserl
and
Heidegger respectively)
to the
primacy
of ethics and
justice,
which
they
considered not corollaries to
philosophy
but its
very
heart
[Ricoeur,
Autrement].
Paradigms
and Positions
As
recently
as 1990, when Levinas characterized Ricoeur's
thought approvingly
as
"phenomenological,"
the latter did not
deny
it [Ricoeur, Aeschlimann, and
Halp6rin
54
35-37];
on the other hand he has
styled
himself "a sort of
post-Kantian,
if
only through
Husserl and Naber-even a
post-Hegelian
Kantian,
as I
jokingly
call
myself' [Ricoeur,
Azouvi,
and
Launay 83].
The
program
of existential
phenomenology-to grasp
prereflective experience through reflection-occupied
the first
phase
of Ricoeur's
career,
but it did so
ambivalently.
His
early
books on Marcel and Karl
Jaspers questioned
the
ideal of the
unity
of the human
person,
whether the "itinerant view"
(Marcel)
or the
"tragic
view"
(Jaspers).
Even Sartre's far more careful and
complex writing ultimately
falls
prey,
in Ricoeur's
opinion,
to an immature desire for
unity.
Ricoeur's Kantianism
emerges
time and
again
to
map
the limits of
thinking
in the murkier areas of human
experience
that
phenomenology
is drawn to. Kant can be felt in Ricoeur's
penchant
for
keeping
modes of
experience (invariably
three of
them)
autonomous but
interacting.
Both
philosophers
define the limits
beyond
which reason cannot
pass,
while Kant
validates the central
place
Ricoeur accords
imagination,
the
single faculty
that animates
every
mode and
every
concern.
Appropriately,
the
imagination
was the focus of the course Ricoeur
prepared
in his
mountain retreat
just
after the war. Never
published
as
such,
this
syllabus
would inflect
his
writing
for the next
half-century,
both because of its
topic
and because of the
logic
of
its
exposition.
In Ricoeur's
outline,
recovered and
presented by
Dosse,
everything begins
with a
descriptive phenomenology
in the manner of Maine de Biran
and,
of
course,
Sartre,
so as to catch the
operation
of the
imagination.
Ricoeur describes the structure of
simple experiences
of illusion and then moves to ever more
complex
functions,
from
daydreaming
to art and
religion. Having grasped
the
process
from the
inside,
Ricoeur
then moves
outside,
where Sartre refused to
go, deconstructing
the
imagination
with
whatever
disciplines
claim to
explain
its
presence
and its
operations (sociology,
psychology, psychoanalysis).
Then comes that third moment Ricoeur
always
insists
upon,
the moment of
synthesis
wherein the
process (here
the
imagination), despite
the
critique
it has
undergone,
instructs us in its
unique way.
In this case a
poetics reintegrates
all levels and all forms of the
imagination.
Poetics,
the name for the
study
of the
specificity
of
imaginative
texts,
also
serves,
in the manner of Kant's
Critique ofJudgment,
to
justify
faith in the
validity
of taste and of
reason,
including
that
very
critical reason that
put
the
imagination
under
suspicion.
Thus in
1947,
before
having yet published
a book or named hermeneutics as his
method,
Ricoeur
displays
in the
embryo
of a
syllabus
what will become his
idiosyncratic
approach.
He also
displays
his fundamental ethos in so
adamantly refusing
to allow
reflection on
experience
to
get trapped
in exclusive concern with self.
Always
he would
distribute
self-concern
across a field of
meaning,
reference,
and
ultimately
action,
via
productive
encounters with texts and other selves. While Ricoeur
consistently
exhibits
this method and
approach
on various
topics,
the
particular topic
of the
imagination
must
be
privileged
as the motor of
productivity
in
every
instance. The
imagination
will surface
unmistakably
in La
mitaphore
vive
(1975)
as that which
pushes language beyond
itself,
and it underwrites the value of
narrative,
which after all is
precisely
a
poetics
of
temporality
that thinks
beyond
the
aporias
of reason. Kantian
critique
allows Ricoeur to
identify aporias
and to locate limits of
thought,
while
poetics,
underwritten
by
Kant's
third
Critique, restores,
if
not
unity,
then at least the value of the human drive to attain it.
The inevitable
thwarting
of this
persistent
human drive had been the core
topic
of
Ricoeur's doctoral thesis. Under the
global
rubric
"Philosophy
of the Will," he
began
publishing
his immense
personal philosophical project,
volume one
coming
out in 1950
as La volontaire et
l'involontaire
(Freedom
and
Nature)
with the second
part,
Finitude
et
culpabilit6 (Finitude
and
Guilt), coming
a decade later. These titles
certainly partake
of the
problematic
tone of existentialism, although
it is Ricoeur's Kantian turn that
helps
him confront determinism and wrest from it some
space
for human
beings
in our
diacritics / summer 2000 55
ability
to
synthesize
inventiveness with lawfulness.
(This opposition
returns
again
and
again
in his
thought,
most
notably
in La
Mitaphore
vive,
where it is raised to the basic
principle
of
language use.)
No
theological compensation
is offered for the scandal of
limitation and
guilt,
the desolate condition in which humans find themselves and which
is Ricoeur's
goad
to
philosophize
in the first
place.
In the idiom of
phenomenology,
he
describes
"pre-human
nature,"
that
is,
the state from which
something
like human nature
emerges, including
various
"personal styles"
of
responding
to
limitation,
from the most
consensual to the most rebellious. Ricoeur would
say
that all his later
work,
including
his books on
Freud,
on
language,
and on narrative
identity,
is anchored in this
phenomenological description,
which runs in
parallel through
the three
separate
but
interacting spheres
he
adapts
from Kant: the
spheres
of
knowledge,
of
action,
and of
feeling.
In all
three,
the human constitutes a
range
of values that can
virtually
be
graphed
on two fundamental
axes,
that which runs from the
particular (sense perception)
to the
general (concept, language)
and that which runs between
origin
and
possibility,
arche
and telos
[see Klemm].
Ricoeur's later books will
depend
on,
but break free
of,
the convolutions of
introspection
that
shape
the usual course of existential
phenomenology.
Late in the 1950s
he
deliberately
took the
step
from
personal
to cultural
experience
and reflection when
he
split
Finitude et
culpabiliti
in two: volume
1,
titled "Fallible
Man,"
remains in the
reflective
idiom,
while volume
2,
"The
Symbolism
of
Evil,"
locates the "fault line" in
human nature
through
an
exegesis
of cultural
expressions. Edging
close to the work of
Mircea
Eliade,
highly popular
at the
time,
he turned first to
symbols
and then to
myths
that coordinate
symbols
into narratives.
Although
he
ultimately judged
this
foray
to be
unsophisticated,
it initiated what would become a
lifelong
series of "detours" en route
to a fuller but
always partial
and
perspectival comprehension
of lack.
Indeed,
ever
after,
Ricoeur would
identify
the "route" as a
starting point
and
reject
the
conceptual clarity
of radical
origin, insisting
that
philosophy begin
not at the
beginning
but in the midst of
the
meanings
all around it. Hence the
primacy
of
interpretation.
In
embarking
on The
Symbolism of
Evil
(1960),
Ricoeur
opted
to
employ
the
vocabulary
of
poetics
on the one hand and of
anthropology
on the
other,
two of the
"human sciences" that were
coming
to the fore at
just
this moment and that he would
need to address head on. His admiration for
Merleau-Ponty, always high,
soared in a
eulogy
he
composed
in 1961
[see
Lectures
2],
which
recognized Merleau-Ponty's audacity
in
supplementing philosophy
with the
disciplines
of
linguistics, sociology, psychology,
and
history.
Ricoeur took
up Merleau-Ponty's
baton in full
knowledge
that existentialism
was
ceding power
to les sciences
humaines,
a
paradigm
shift visible in all fields. Marxists
who had followed Sartre now had to
adjust
to the new force of Louis Althusser. Indeed
Sartre was felt to have been knocked off his
position
when in 1962 Claude L6vi-Strauss
concluded The
Savage
Mind
(dedicated
"to the
memory
of
Merleau-Ponty")
with the
extraordinary epilogue "History
and Dialectic."
Ricoeur,
while never close to
Sartre,
might
nevertheless have been
expected
to take
his
side,
and indeed the editors of
Esprit campaigned
to defend humanism
against
the
human sciences in the name of
agency
and freedom. But Ricoeur in effect
adopted
Merleau-Ponty's expansive
role in his
interchanges
with L6vi-Strauss. As Dosse
reports
it, Ricoeur looked not to debate
L6vi-Strauss
so much as to
apprentice
in
anthropology
and
linguistics
if
only
to
emerge
from the cul de sac of The
Symbolism ofEvil.
And so he
constituted a L6vi-Strauss
study group
at
Esprit.
For several
years running
he conducted
courses that
minutely
dissected the
arguments
and contents of an
anthropology
of
American Indians that
posed
as a
study
of human nature in the universal sense.
Along
the
way,
Ricoeur schooled himself
deeply
in the structural
linguistics
so crucial not
just
to
L6vi-Strauss
but to Roland Barthes, A. J. Greimas, and
Jacques
Lacan.
56
MR.
.... .... ..
EZ.
:?~?iiE
Ns.:?
nW:i~...
:-M
?.?~. ??:?i.?;f ':X!
.?hO?
::?'iBnz
Thus Ricoeur's 1967
riposte
to
L6vi-Strauss, "Structure, Word, Event,"
represents
the fruit of a
deep
and
partially sympathetic understanding
of this alternative vision of
culture. His
brilliant,
characteristic move in this seminal
essay
was to
interpose
a term
between the
dyad "langue/parole"
of Saussurian
linguistics;
that
term, "mot,"
carries
thick traces of
theology
and
history, complicating
what he saw as too
simple
a distinction.
Every
word,
Ricoeur
points
out,
bears in its
etymology
the sediment of
prior
uses that
amount to a
history
of
experience. History
can be accounted for neither
by
structural
rules
(langue)
nor
by
an accumulation of individual events
(parole).
Words-les mots-
especially
in their
evolution,
are what bear
tradition,
heritage,
and the credit human
beings
can draw on for a shared future. Structural
analysis
of texts
may
be
indispensable
to an
explanation
of their
power
to make
meaning,
but it is
completely inadequate
to the
task of
comprehending
their
import
and
consequence.
This much he retained from his
selective
acceptance
of
Heidegger.
Ricoeur's
opponents
in this
argument
were not
just
the famous names associated
with les sciences
humaines;
they
included
theologians
and biblical scholars as well.
Indeed one could read Ricoeur's contestation with
Levi-Strauss, Greimas, Althusser,
and Lacan as
preparation
for the more lethal battle he
fought
for a
perspectival
and
polyvalent
view of the Bible and of
religion against
absolutists on the one hand and
relativists on the other. As has so often been the case in the life of a man for whom all
discourses
interrelate,
biblical hermeneutics had laid the
ground
for,
and was then the
beneficiary of,
a renewed
poetics.
The
literary
work became for Ricoeur the
prototype
of the intersection between the
personal
and the universal that marks his
theological
concerns. For both the
scriptural
text and the
poetic
text can be considered fertile
yet
unfinished,
open
to a future that readers find themselves drawn to
forge through
interpretation
and
application.
The
literary
work carries values released from the control
of its author. Like a
"word,"
it can be cited and taken
up
in distinct and
quite
different
moments.
Interpretation
allows the
poem
to function
fully
at a distance from the event
or intentions that
brought
it about.
Still,
its force
depends
on its status as
event,
both as
record of a
process
of
composition (subject
to
psychoanalytic
and
ideological forces)
and as
goad
to a
process
of
appropriation
in which those who encounter it take it into the
future as
part
of their lives.
Only
its
independence
from
any
actual event allows it to
play
this role as "virtual event." And that
independence
results from its structural
organization,
the
understanding
of which is
precisely
the
goal
of the human sciences.
Ricoeur
recognizes
what
appear
to be
opposed approaches
to literature
(including
phenomenological
elaboration,
structural
description
and
analysis, poetic interpretation,
and historical
contextualization),
while at the same time
making
these
approaches
mutually interdependent
in
accounting
for the richness of
phenomena
that
go
to the root
of human
experience,
like literature and
religion.
Ricoeur's
reputation beyond
those drawn to the
theological
reverberation of his
thought
took off with the 1965
publication
of De
l'interpretation:
Un essai sur Freud
(translated
in 1970 as Freud and
Philosophy:
An
Essay
in
Interpretation).
What a
daring
career move this was.
Caught
within a
self-justifying theological
discourse that
underlay
even his
foray
into
anthropological poetics,
The
Symbolism of
Evil,
and
sensing, along
with
Merleau-Ponty
in his final
years,
the
entropy
of
phenomenology,
Ricoeur
abruptly
set out on the
unlikely
detour
posed by psychoanalysis.
Freud stood out as a
challenge
to his faith, his reason, his
very
sense of
identity.
To his credit, Ricoeur did not shrink
from
thinking through
Freud to the end. This meant
locating
the
places
where Freudian
thought stops,
its "ends." Ricoeur was
maligned
in France for
failing
to take into account
Freud's
legacy, particularly
in Lacan. Indeed it was Lacan who most vilified Ricoeur for
this omission, even
though
Ricoeur attended Lacan's seminars and did his best to have
a
dialogue
with a man who, in Dosse's account, was interested
mainly
in self-
58
.1 X~%XP'
C
311?
V.. C..,::
. .. .. ..
aggrandizement.
But in the United
States,
where his book had
gestated
as the 1964
Terry
lectures at
Yale,
Ricoeur became a most
approachable
French
philosopher.
Ricoeur
gave
us a Freud that was
comprehensible, powerful, yet
limited,
as
compared
to Lacan's
Freud,
whose
thought
became
intimidating, incomprehensible,
and limitless.
Freud allowed Ricoeur to raise the
question
closed to
phenomenology concerning
that which lies
beyond
consciousness. Husserl had made room for the "unreflected"
areas off the horizon of
every
intuition of
consciousness,
but was constrained to believe
that such zones
literally
exist
only
to the extent that
they
are available for eventual
entry
into consciousness. Freud's
"unconscious," however,
is far more radical: irretrievable
to
consciousness,
it not
only
exists but controls the existence of the conscious
subject.
Ricoeur's
religious upbringing may
have
permitted
him to abandon the
pride
of
consciousness,
something
unthinkable for Husserl. He echoes St. Paul: "Consciousness
finds itself
by losing
itself. It finds itself instructed and clarified after
losing
itself and
its narcissism"
[Ricoeur
and
Ihde 153].
One must
give
over consciousness to the
analyst
so as to receive in return another life in abundance. This is the miracle of
therapy,
a
miracle few have
experienced
but which has been
reported frequently enough
to bolster
the belief of the faithful in the truth of the unconscious and in the
project
of
analysis.
Might
Ricoeur
accept
the humiliations to the
ego
exacted
by psychoanalysis
as a
ruse to convert the heathen
[Ricoeur, Azouvi,
and
Launay 90]?
Dosse's account allows
us to
imagine
this. For Ricoeur claims that
Freud, Marx,
and a line of
"prophets
of
extremity" [see Megill] stemming
from Nietzsche have torn down
every
institution,
every
monument of
civilization,
including
the institution of the
self,
leaving humanity
with
nothing
but the movement of force and scattered elements of
signification [Ricoeur
and
Ihde 148].
And
yet
these
prophets
evince a heroic embrace of a
deeper
truth than
that whose edifice
they
have shattered. The result is a
gain
for consciousness. The
Nietzschean
overman,
like the
patient
on the other side of
psychoanalysis,
has
gained
a
certain adulthood of consciousness in
recognizing
and
willing
the loss of the dominance
of consciousness within existence. It is at this
point
that Ricoeur
brings Hegel
to
bear,
in
a move that would haunt him for the next
twenty-five years
until the "renunciation of
Hegel"
at the end of Time and Narrative.
Hegel's developmental
and
suprapersonal
Phenomenology of
the
Spirit represents
the countercurrent of Freud's
regressive analysis
of the individual
psyche.
Where Freud traces
experience
to its infantile
elements,
Hegel
traces the maturation of the
Spirit
from its
happy
childhood
phases
in the
"figures"
of
the Greek thinkers
through
its troubled
skeptical figures
that
precede
the adulthood
reached in
Hegel's
own consciousness of
Spirit.
Ricoeur would locate in the institutions
of culture both the irrational sources of
symbols (Freud mercilessly
shows us
these)
and
their fruits
(Hegel promises
their
intelligibility). Symbols
are once
again
the
privileged
sites of both
regression
and
progression,
and of an
analysis
that breaks them down into
the forces and the
primitive meanings
that
gave
rise to them as well as into the
possibilities
with which their adult formulations allow us to think. Freud
may
take
Oedipus
back to
patricide
and
incest,
but
Hegel recognizes
in the
blinded, castrated,
wounded
ego
of
Oedipus
the wisdom that
emerges
at Colonus.
Symbols provide
the
possibility
of a
"gain
of
thought
and of
consciousness,"
even as
they
insist on a
dispossession
of the
self.
A Thousand, or Just a Few Well-Sited Plateaus?
Gilles Deleuze has been muffled
long enough
in this article which
opened
with his
name. And he must be
groaning
at the last
paragraph,
Freud and
Hegel epitomizing
the
enemies of free
thought,
which it was his mission to liberate. To him Ricoeur must seem
60
caught
on a
tightrope
like a circus
monkey running
back toward Freud's
archaeology
and forward toward
Hegel's teleology, destiny driving
him in both directions. And
yet
Ricoeur's belief in the
openness
of the
symbol
would attract Deleuze. Both men
willingly
relinquish
standard
philosophy
for the
insights
made
possible by
the
disreputable
intellectual fruits of art and
(for
Ricoeur at
least)
of
religion.
Even in the realm of
art,
however,
they disagree
about the extent of the
openness
of the
symbol
that
tempts
both
of them to think
thought beyond
consciousness. Insofar as Ricoeur follows
Freud,
the
symbol gives
onto an
expanded
human
nature,
beginning
with the immutable but hidden
structure of the unconscious that inclines us to be as we are. Deleuze refuses the
constriction this
implies.
He
rejects
the
primacy
of
nature,
the
organic,
the hidden. Instead
he
sings
of the
virtual,
the
incompossible,
the machinic. The "Powers of the False" are
not those of the unconscious that have been
lurking
beneath the surface all
along,
but
those that
proliferate--even schizophrenically-along
contours of life
only
the barest
fraction of which come to consciousness and into
"reality."
Deleuze makes us
gods
insofar as we
participate
in this
spread
of the
possible.
Ricoeur's devotion to the
expansion
of
meaning
is driven
by
his faith in truths
already gained by
his forebears in
philosophy,
by
artists of
every epoch,
and
by contemporaries living
and
thinking differently
but
living
and
thinking
in the selfsame
universe,
one that is in
part
shareable,
one that all of
us
explore
in our own fashion. When he announced on television that
"Philosophy
for
me is an
anthropology" [Marquette],
Ricoeur meant to
keep theological inquiry separate
from the natural
inquiry
of
philosophy.
But the term
"anthropology" aptly
suits his
way
of
studying
human
being (including
first of all
himself) through
"other" human
beings
and
through
their
practices.
It should be
evident, then,
why, despite
their
wildly
different
styles
of
thought
and
expression,
Ricoeur and Deleuze have both been able to claim the interest of humanists
outside the realm of
philosophy proper.
His two-volume treatise Cinema
I
and Cinema
2 has made Deleuze essential
reading
in film
studies,
renewing
that
discipline
at a time
when it was in
danger
of
dissolving
into
merely
another site of cultural studies. Ricoeur
has tantalized
literary
scholars in an
analogous way.
His
lengthy
detour into
metaphor
and narrative-four
large
volumes
appearing
between 1975 and 1985-offer a sustained
reflection and
analysis
on the nature and
potential
of
literary
discourse. Both men recruit
imaginative
and creative texts to
replace
or
supplement philosophical
ones.
Invariably
these are drawn from the modernist
paradigm.
Deleuze showed himself an
incredibly
versatile consumer of
films, art,
and
fiction,
able to write with
genius
on an
extraordinary
diversity
of difficult works. Ricoeur
evidently
is also at home in the thicket of the fine
arts,
poetry,
and even
photography.
Still,
his
practical
criticism has been confined to
fairly predictable readings
of
Proust,
Thomas
Mann,
and
Virginia
Woolf in volume 2 of
Time and
Narrative,
choosing
novels that
thematize
his theses. His discussion of
painters
remains abstract. He
pays homage
to Cezanne and van
Gogh
as men driven to
repay
some
vague
"debt" when after countless tortured
attempts they
come to rest on a
singular
solution to some
"singular
knot" of issues that
only
their
paintings
allow them to
experience [Ricoeur, Azouvi,
and
Launay 178].
Deleuze and Ricoeur
acknowledge
that
art achieves
universality
when it is most
particular,
so
particular
that no
language,
and
certainly
no
philosophy,
could restate what it has made
intelligible.
Although
he is
personally
drawn to
nonfigurative painting
and to twelve-tone music,
Ricoeur's main discussion of art relates to narrative, where
questions
of
identity
and
representation
are central. His attitude toward
representation
would seem to sunder him
from Deleuze at the outset, for Deleuze has done more than
anyone
to dethrone its
status in
philosophy.
The
very
word
representation acknowledges
a
prior
and
deeper
reality
that exacts debts of
fealty
from the human all-too-human.
Representation
curbs
creativity
in favor of
knowledge
and
position;
it
provides
a
fundamentally spatial
model
diacritics / summer 2000 61
rather than an
evolving, temporal
one. Deleuze's
critique updates
that of
Bergson
and of
phenomenologists
like
Merleau-Ponty
who are concerned with
process
and
emergence
over
clarity
and the certain
recognition
of states of affairs.
Ricoeur,
on the other
hand,
has welcomed
representation precisely
because it
inevitably
introduces what he takes to be the
inescapability
of
position.
He is
among
those for whom
(French) philosophy
fell into its
original
sin,
"egology," having
been
tempted by
the snake of consciousness which held out the
apple, seemingly
natural and
healthy,
of direct reflection on
transpersonal problems.
But reflection is never
simple.
As soon as a
representation
is
engaged,
the
"point
of reflection" of
phenomenology
becomes
merely "point-of-view,"
which Husserl
hoped
to neutralize via the second
(eidetic)
reduction.
Ricoeur,
after
finding
an eidetic
approach unsatisfactory
in his first
volume of
Philosophy of
the Will
[Ricoeur xiv], accepted perspective
as inevitable and
advocates a hermeneutics wherein
perspectives
can be
multiplied,
crossed
over,
and
opposed
in the midst of a cultural world whose horizons shift with
history. Representations
serve as heuristics for
knowledge
and action. Some
representations
extend
thought beyond
their
apparent
content to life itself. And
representations always
work
"by
extension."
Metaphors
and
narratives,
whether fictional or
historical,
are
representations
around
and
through
which
thought emerges. They
form
stepping
stones--or, why not,
plateaus-
in a
trajectory
of
understanding
that circles
past
the
aporias
that
inevitably open up
in
front of direct reflection. Here Ricoeur crosses
paths
with Deleuze who likewise would
dislocate the
path
of
thought by
means of the "intercessors" he loves to introduce from
far afield
[Deleuze, "Mediators"].
Hegelian
in
spite
of
himself,
Paul Ricoeur's
plateaus
are fewer in number than
those of Deleuze and Guattari. When asked about the
scope
of
philosophy by
the son of
his
friend,
Esprit
editor Jean-Marie
Domenach,
Ricoeur
aphorized:
"Listen
young
man,
philosophy
is
really very simple.
There are
only
two
problems:
the one and the
multiple
and the same and the other "
[Dosse,
PR
270].
But
philosophy
has a
history,
because
these insoluble
problems
are
always
raised in discursive situations that themselves
require
study.
Hermeneutics,
it turns
out,
amounts to the
careful,
indebted
exploration
of such
situations,
striving
to understand-that
is,
to recover and uncover-what must ever lie
beyond
the
particular
moments and motives of our
questioning
and
answering.
Unsurprisingly, history
and fiction are the
landscapes
from whose most
prominent
plateaus
Ricoeur's hermeneutics takes
flight. Philosophy
is indebted
to,
and at the service
of,
these textual
practices by
which the
imagination
strives to
bring
coherence and the
illusion of
permanence
to ceaseless
change.
This discourse of debt with which Ricoeur
justified
the
irreplaceable
value of both
history
and fiction
may
have come from Emmanuel
Levinas,
with whom he interacted
intensely
after 1980
[Ricoeur,
Time and Narrative 3:
124-25]. Lurking
beneath his
discussion of
traces, cadavers,
and
forgetfulness
is
unquestionably
the
Shoah,
unavoidable
in France in this
period.
Ricoeur's
Protestantism,
sensitive to the
coupled
terms "debit"
and
"debt,"
is able to
respond positively by invoking
the notions of "credit" and
"credibility."
He even seems to
emphasize
the economic connotation behind a favorite
phrase:
"Someone counts on me"
[Breuil].
For as he makes clear in a 1991 television
interview in the series "Presence
Protestante," every promise
derives
from,
contributes
to, and
puts
at risk the
vulnerability
of self, of other, and of
language [Marquette].
If I
break a
promise,
I make a
mockery
of the self I
pretended
to be, I
disrespect
whomever
my
broken word
injures,
and I
damage language,
the chief institution and medium
through
which human
beings
extend themselves
beyond
the here and now.
Language
stabilizes
states of affairs
only
if its
propositions
are believed to
apply beyond
the moment of their
utterance. This is as true, Ricoeur
might argue,
for deconstructive
philosophy
as for
marriage vows; both assume a debt to the institution of
language
which makes what
they
state
meaningful,
and
persistently
so.
62
Deleuze has no
patience
with debts or
promises,
and
certainly
not with a balance
sheet of debits and credits. He would unmoor
philosophy
from
language altogether
and
destabilize the
subject
so as to release new
energies
and
concepts
that have been held in
check
by
the
repressive
self.
Nietzschean,
he demands the overthrow of common sense
and common
language
on behalf of a
living power
which runs
through
and
beyond
the
self and which the self can
help
release
by letting go
of
self-consistency.
Hence the
premium
he
placed
on
schizophrenia,
nomadism,
and the
false,
all of which accumulate
and release
power only by upsetting every
institution that ties life to
predictability
and
sameness.
If he had it in him to be
snide,
Ricoeur would
surely
ridicule in Deleuze a Continental
tendency
to address
problems
as if from scratch. Extreme
positions play
their role in
Ricoeur's
thought
too,
but it is a heuristic
role; they
serve as
guides
to
thought,
barriers
against
which
thought
must rebound in its career toward the true and the
right.
Extremists
succumb to the hubris of
believing
themselves at the source of whatever is valuable in
philosophy, ready
to
jettison
most or all other views from the outset. Ricoeur instead
modestly
believes he has
stepped
into a world
already
made
meaningful by
earlier
thought.
Indeed he believes we are born on a
moving walkway
of
thought, heading
in a direction
not of our own
choosing [Breuil]. Agency
comes into
play
first and
mainly
as
"reconnaissance,"
literally re-cognizing
our
heritage,
and
deciding
what
parts
of it
actively
to maintain. How then does one initiate a decisive action or submit to a
conversion,
when one is
always already
enmeshed in
significance?
The answer comes in the mode
of a
hermeneutics,
a
reinterpretation
and
present-day application
of the
already thought,
the
already
written. Hermeneutic
phenomenology
amounts to a tactic of
retreat, reflection,
deflection,
and redirection. Ricoeur sees himself more as a
"negotiator"
than an
originator
of
ideas;
or
rather,
in the idiom of La
metaphore vive,
his
originality
comes
through
as
"perspective."
He allows
utterly
new
meaning
to
open up through
his adroit and
sometimes brilliant
maneuvering
of
concepts
rather than
through
that
pure
"creation of
concepts" ("cr6er
des
concepts") by
which Deleuze and Guattari define the
genuine
vocation of
philosophy
[11].
This manner of
thinking
and of
living
is most
fully
articulated in the
summary
work
of
1990,
Ricoeur's
masterpiece,
Soi-meme comme un autre
(Oneself
as
Another).
Painstakingly,
Ricoeur
develops conceptions
of the self
deriving
from both the
English
(analytic)
and the German
(ontological)
traditions before
recovering
the "narrative"
self,
the self as someone about whom a
past
and future can be recounted and
projected.
This in turn
permits
him to
engage
in an ethical discourse of self as
agent
in
history.
Retreat
initiates,
but cannot
complete,
an
inquiry brought
about
by
doubts
concerning
the
"mysteries" (Marcel)
of
identity
and
relationship.
The book's wonderful title isolates
in its three
English
words the chief
targets
of doubt and sources of faith that have oriented
Ricoeur's interactions from the
beginning.
Radical doubt has
always
been associated
with a concern about the
very
existence and then the
intelligibility
or
accessibility
of
"another." Later,
turned on
"oneself,"
skepticism grew
into the
enterprise
of
psychoanalysis. Finally,
deconstruction has dismantled the
seeming transparence
of the
relation between self and
other,
the innocent "comme"
("as")
that stands for
language,
whose
stability
and
authority
cannot be taken for
granted.
Oneself
as Another stitches a brilliant new
pattern
from the
unraveling
cloth of
ontology
and
epistemology.
Once
again,
the
inextinguishable
force of
imagination
comes
to rescue freedom from the dissolution of the human, this time
by encouraging
us to
claim a certain
identity (via the
privileged
term
"attestation") even if our bodies have
mutated and our circumstances, beliefs, and friends have
changed.
We narrate such
changes
and become the character of our own
story,
and we do so in a field of others
with whom we
literally
share the
plot
of
history.
And so Ricoeur's
philosophy,
which
diacritics
/
summer 2000 63
floats on the
shifting
seas of
interpretation,
finds its harbor not in
ontology
or
epistemology,
but rather in aesthetics and
ethics,
modes of behavior that we exercise
every day
and
circumstantially.
As he enters the new
millennium,
writing--ever writing-Ricoeur
must find it
appropriate
to salute
history
and its twin
mechanisms,
memory
and
forgetting [La
memoire,
l'histoire,
I'oubli]. Forgetting belongs
to his recent meditations on
justice,
particularly
in
regard
to
international
and interracial violence.
Forgetting
allies itself
with
forgiving
so as to
permit
a
beginning
which
acknowledges
the
past
but which
selectively applies
the burden of
heritage
to the
present.
At the level of the
person,
Ricoeur's
Oneself
as Another took its title from
Georges
Bernanos's
country priest,
who wrote in his
journal:
"Grace means
forgetting oneself";
it means
"loving
oneself
humbly,
as one would
any
of the
suffering
members of Jesus Christ"
[Oneselfas
Another
24].
Of course as soon as one chooses a
particular "suffering
member" to love
(oneself,
for
example),
obsessions
may
follow,
so that one records
every
movement of the heart
in a
journal (Bernanos)
or
develops
thousands of
pages
of
philosophy
to honor and
understand what one
loves,
even
humbly (Ricoeur).
This is
hardly forgetting
oneself.
Ricoeur
is, therefore,
far more devoted to
memory [Breuil].
Where
Heidegger
refined
his senses and his
speculative powers
to orient himself in a world into which he felt
thrown,
Ricoeur seems to have been born
reading
traces of
meaning
in a world
overflowing
with
meaning.
There is
perhaps
more Platonism in Ricoeur than has ever
been
noted;
for
Plato,
the soul recovers itself
by remembering
a
primordial
truth to
which it stands
innately
attached;
for
Ricoeur,
the
person
becomes
"itself'
in
re-cognizing
a
heritage given circumstantially
at birth.
History
is the double movement first of
understanding
that
heritage by interrogating
its traces and second of
moving
forward
from this
particular
stance to a future that affects a world made
up
of one's
contemporaries
and successors.
History (personal
and collective
memory, assiduously uncovered,
interpreted,
and
debated) provides
a limited number of
plateaus
from which
groups
of
persons (one's family,
social
circle, nation)
can become oriented so as to move toward a
horizon. All this takes
place
in a climate of
conflict,
for access to the
past
and a vision of
the future are
strictly perspectival.
And
perspectives
clash as we determine the existence
of the
past (what
is maintained in the collective
memory
and what is
forgotten),
debate
the
meaning
of that
past,
and
negotiate
a future that
might
maintain or break from the
past.
But if one treats oneself as
another,
if one is
open
to
metaphors
and narratives that
shift
perspectives,
such clashes contribute to the
ever-struggling community
of
understanding.
La
mimoire,
l'histoire,
I'oubli
appropriately
crowns these
interlocking
speculations
about the
representation
of the
past.
What must
surely
be his ultimate
project
stands at once as a
professional epistemological disquisition
about the nature of historical
knowledge,
a rather
phenomenological
meditation on
aging
and
memory,
and a
paternal
reflection on the civic
responsibilities
at work in
commemoration,
forgiving
and
forgetting.
Dosse writes a
triumphal biography
in
chronicling
Ricoeur's rise to what seems an
ultimate
plateau
of wisdom. Consecrated as the
"philosophe
de la
Cite,"
Ricoeur has
achieved the
right
and the
responsibility
to declaim
magisterially
on
topics
as immense
as
justice
and
history. Characteristically, however,
he refuses to
adopt
the confident
posture
he
might
be
thought
to have earned. He has turned to the
topic
of
memory
not
only
because he now carries within him so
many
decades of his own memories, nor
because he rues the inevitable erosion of this
faculty
as he
ages,
but because
memory
can be seen as the
precondition
and the mechanism of both
identity
and
history, always
his
major concerns.
The "remorse" he
recently expressed
at
having neglected Bergson
all these
years
is
symptomatic
of a
full-fledged self-critique:
Ricoeur believes he too
quickly
linked time
64
to narrative and narrative to
history, creating
a "short-circuit" of discourse that
bypassed
the "life" of
identity altogether.
Beneath all the
propositions
and declarations of narrative
and
history
stands the
glue
of
identity,
"the
primary fastening,
which is
memory,"
and
which involves the
lyrical,
non-narrative
genres
that
express
"the self-constitution of
memory
in
passive syntheses" [Ricoeur, Azouvi,
and
Launay 91-92].
Ricoeur must
have in mind
something
like Gabriel Marcel's wonderful remarks on the
integrity
of
melody,
which he takes
straight
from
Bergson's arguments
in Matter and
Memory
[Marcel, "Bergsonism
and
Music"].
A
melody (or
a
poem,
in
Augustine's
classical
formulation of the same
problem
in On Christian
Doctrine)
exists
only
as a whole even
though
it is
given
one sound at a time. And
so,
what of the
integrity
of the listener who
intuits the whole thanks to the mechanism of
primary memory,
which holds
together
elements that
go together? By
extension the listener intuits his or her own "coherence of
existence." This
occurs,
Ricoeur now
intimates,
as a
precondition
for the "narrative
identity"
that he
may
have been too
hasty
to
lay
as the cornerstone of the "self." Behind
narrative
identity
lie micromechanisms of
memory.
And from these
grow
the
roots,
trunks, branches,
and flowers of our
personal
and social histories.
In
recognizing
the
dependence
of culture on what are
effectively neurological
processes,
Ricoeur
may
have
put
himself in
dialogue
with the brain scientists like Jean-
Pierre
Changeux [see Changeux
and
Ricoeur],
but more
enticing
is the
potential
rendezvous with
Bergson
and Deleuze. For Ricoeur needs
memory
to
play
a role similar
to Geist in
Husserl,
that which links
intentionality
and the
hyle
of affect and
sensation,
and this
brings
him close to the entire
Bergsonian problematic.
Those,
like
myself,
who
have followed Ricoeur's
peregrinations
over four
decades,
redirecting
them whenever
possible
toward the arts
(in my case,
the
cinema)
must
rejoice.
Deleuze, Ricoeur;
and the
Image of
Cinema
From structuralism and
psychoanalysis
to theories of
metaphor,
narrative,
and
history,
Ricoeur's
timing
has
preternaturally anticipated
the concerns of film
theory.
Yet he has
had
nothing
to
say
about
this,
the art form of the
century.
Now, however,
having
broached
the obtuseness of the trace and zeroed in on the mechanism of
memory,
Ricoeur's
thought
must at last
traverse,
or be
conscripted
to
help organize,
the field of the cinematic. For
the cinema is
precisely
an
apparatus
of
memory, safeguarding
as well as
manipulating
traces of the
past.
It is also the most
potent
narrational force of our time and
unparalleled
in the formation of
identities,
those of stars and of
spectators.
Ricoeur
may ignore
the
cinema,
but his close readers should not.
In a
chapter
entitled
"Figuration"
in
Concepts
in Film
Theory [Andrew 168-69], I
recruited Ricoeur's
dynamic
view of
"metaphore
vive" to counter the more mechanical
study
of cinematic
tropes
found in Christian Metz's
Imaginary Signifier.
I
argued
that
figuration-the tracing
or
outlining
of new contours of
meaning-could
occur at
any
of
what I still take to be the three
key stages
of cinematic
signification: (a)
the
congealing
of
sensory
stimuli into
representations, (b)
the
organization
of
representations
into a
represented
world
(narrative, descriptive, formal),
and
(c)
the rhetorical or fictional
argument implied by
that world. Given his own habits, Ricoeur
ought
to
ratify
the notion
of
stages
in cinematic
signification (particularly
the idea that there should be three of
them).
The "art" of cinema he would
surely lodge
in the
metaphoric figuration possible
at each
stage
but
generally
concentrated in one, depending
on the mode or
genre
at
play.
That was the extent of
my
use of Ricoeur in 1984.
Today, through
him I would instead advance the role of
memory
from first to last in
the full are of the
experience
of cinema. For
only something
like "the
primary fastening"
diacritics / summer 2000 65
allows
photograms
to cohere into shots in the first
place,
and shots to
impress
on us "in
passive syntheses"
their
nearly
ineluctable coherence.
Next,
memory
maintains the
represented
elements in mind as their narrative or
descriptive pattern emerges,
and,
finally,
it allows us to
compare
that
pattern
to other structures of
intelligibility,
whether
commonly
available ones
(genre, auteur)
or those whose source is
mysterious
or brand-
new and must be
sought
out. In
short,
a
phenomenology might
describe the
transformation,
via
memory,
of sensations of
sight
and sound
produced by projected
film into time and narrative. These would then serve as a
prelude
to the fictions and
histories on the
screen,
which Ricoeur could
undoubtedly
address in his characteristic
hermeneutic mode.
At a
higher
level of abstraction films
provide experimental
solutions to the two
problems
of
philosophy
Ricoeur deems fundamental: the one and the
multiple,
the self
and the other. "The one and the
multiple"
is endemic to a medium
caught
between the
aura of
originality
and the mechanisms of
reproduction,
a medium where the work's
individuality
is established
against
the
background
of
genre,
a medium
through
which
each
spectator
senses a tension between self and other in the semi-darkness of the movie
theater. As for the second fundamental
problem, self
is
thematized
in
every
fiction film
via
processes
of identification and
by strategies
of the
gaze,
while the
opacity
of the
index-the
photographic
trace-stands as
other,
particularly
that most unavoidable index
of
alterity,
the human face in
close-up
on the screen.
The
particular emphasis
of each cinematic
"experiment,"
the
stage
where its
figuration expands
into new
territory-in short,
the difference it aims to make and the
sameness it
perpetuates-suggests
a
typology
of
modes, periods, genres,
and
styles.
It
was to
parse
this rich field of cinematic
experimentation
that Deleuze elaborated the
baroque
network of
categories
that
comprises
his two-volume
study
of the medium. In
his
spirit,
we
might
venture that classical films
develop equilibrium
between the one
and the
multiple (through rhyming, redundancy,
and
repetition)
and between self and
other. Postmodern
films,
as ahistorical
amalgams
of
styles, may
dissolve the
question
of
identity through digitalization
and often conflate the self and the other in an
orgy
of
citation and
simulation,
whether in the
key
of
nostalgia
or of
parody.
Ricoeur feels most
at home between these
extremes,
responding
to artworks
produced
in the mode of
modernism. And it is modernist cinema that fills the
corpus
Deleuze examines in his
second
volume,
beginning
with Italian
neorealism,
where the
disequilibrium
of self and
other is resolved most often in favor of the
other,
the trace that
dramatically
derails
every
effort to
appropriate
it. Where Ricoeur sanctions the work of the
imagination
in
both fiction and
history
as it
struggles
with and
against
the traces of a broken
world,
Deleuze celebrates the
fertility
of a cinema freed from the anchor of a false
equivalence
between the actual and the mental. The
time-image grows
out of the
inability
of the
subject
to come into
phase
with a
post-Holocaust, post-atomic-bomb
social and
physical
landscape.
And it
grows willy-nilly
in a
cinemascape
where the virtual and the actual
are,
to use the famous term he took from
Leibniz, "incompossible" [Flaxman 5-7].
But Deleuze's
exciting
formulation risks
dropping
off the discursive table on the
extreme
edge
of which it
characteristically
teeters. So concerned with the
utterly
new,
with the
"incompossible,"
he
has
tempted
his followers
to
treat
history cavalierly, merely
to
engender any
difference whatever. This at least is the
danger
that makes me turn to
Ricoeur's
putative project
in film studies and, taking
a cue from his method, hold
open
both the mediation of his
essentially
hermeneutic mediation and Deleuze's insistence
on radical
creativity.
Between these
poles
films
may
be most
fertilely
viewed and valued.
To turn Ricoeur's mediation into an extreme
may
seem
contrary
until one listens to
the messianic
openness
of his
program.
He would
vivify
the future
by revivifying
representations (strong films, in our
example)
that have
given
us our sense of the
present.
66
At the
antipode
of Deleuze's "Powers of the
False," then,
stands Ricoeur's "Powers of
the Trace." These two
comprise
the fundamental
properties
of the cinematic. If Deleuze
has
emphasized
"fabulation" and
"virtual,"
Ricoeur is known as "le fidele avec sa
memoire."
Since
fidelity
and
memory
should attend an art form based on "The
Ontology
of the
Photographic Image" (the
title of the
great essay
with which Andre Bazin launched
modem film
theory
in
1945),
one can
imagine,
in the
place
of
Ricoeur,
Bazin
offering
Deleuze
encouragement
and caution.
Encouragement
would come from Bazin's
fascination with
geology, botany,
and other natural
processes
whose traces on film can
lead to effects he was
ready
to call "surrealist" and "fantastic." Well before
Deleuze,
Bazin understood cinematic fabulation to
profit
from its
partly
inhuman source. But he
argued
that it should remain true to that
source,
and so would
surely
have cautioned
Deleuzians intoxicated
by
the
nonorganic infinity
of the
digital.
When the virtual attains
parity
with the
actual,
cinema writes off its debt to the
trace; then,
floating
unanchored
in a sea of
images
of its own
devising,
cinema will have abandoned its historical
impulse.
Heretofore,
all films have documented
reality;
as Godard
said, echoing Bazin,
the most
fantastical fiction
registers
the faces of actors
literally
traced on celluloid at such and
such a time.
Cinema,
the art of the modem era best theorized
by
Bazin,
yokes history
and fiction.
Similarly,
Ricoeur
brilliantly argued
in 1985 that the debt felt
by
the historian
(to
traces left in the
archive) corresponds
to the debt felt
by
the fabulator
(to
the idea
whose
insistence,
if not whose
truth,
disciplines
the
process
of creation and causes such
agony
when the results are
"just
not
right") [Time
and Narrative 3:
192].
The cinema is
the site
par
excellence both of such debts and of their
commingling.
The
postwar
modernity
of the art
form, agree Giorgio
de Vincenti
[11-24]
and
Dominique
Paini,
arises from its simultaneous
gains
in
photographic
realism
(natural light,
location
shooting,
and so
forth)
and fictional
experimentation (unreliable narrators,
indiscernibility
of dreams and
flashbacks).
Deleuze's tastes and notions
respond
to these
special powers
of the medium and the
particular power
of films
just emerging
in the wake of World War
II,
those that introduced
"bifurcated time." In his second
volume,
Deleuze
proclaimed
the absolute
novelty
of
Renoir's Le
regle
du
jeu,
of Welles's
Lady from Shanghai,
of Neorealism and the New
Wave. Such films
open
onto
everything interesting
in the modem cinema. Deleuze drew
on Bazin's
prescience
in
this,
for it was Bazin
who,
we have
already
noted,
first took
Welles
seriously,
Bazin who
brought
Rossellini to Paris for the
astounding premiere
of
Paisa,
Bazin who consecrated his final
years
to a
magnificent study
of
Renoir,
and
Bazin who fathered the New Wave. In
sum,
he was intimate with the
time-image
in the
very
course of its
appearing.
Thus the onset of Deleuze's dual career as
philosopher
and
cinephile
in the 1940s
and
'50s
coincides with the
origin
of the
time-image
he would later celebrate. Deleuze
went
seriously
to the movies
during
the era of auteurism at Cahiers du
cinema,
and the
Cahiers
legacy
is
apparent
in his attention to
directors,
to their
style
and
importance,
and in his
genuinely
fantastical
aspirations
for cinema. In the
Anglo-American
academic
community,
Deleuze's film books have been treated as an
ingenious,
obsessive,
maniacal
system
of
images
with little
apparent
social relevance. His advocates, it is true, often
extend his brilliant
explorations
of the audiovisual texture of films, denigrating
narrative
and reference; seldom do Deleuzians attend to the historical
interplay
of films, save for
establishing adjacent
films from which the one under consideration breaks free in the
pure power
of its
spontaneous
creation.
It is here that Ricoeur, under the anachronistic
tutelage
of Bazin, might
enter as
"philosophe
de la
Cit6
du cinema." For
Frangois
Dosse's
encompassing biography
inspires
me to retain Ricoeur as a model of
responsibility
to the films of the
past,
to the
diacritics / summer 2000 67
traces of a more distant
past
films are able so
powerfully
to
register,
and to the work of
filmmakers who
refigure
those traces so as to build the sort of cinematic
sphere
we now
inhabit,
and the social
sphere
we
legitimately
dream of.
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