A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness, and Action(Vol 2): Ricoeur, Aristotle, Kant and the hermeneutics of mythology and symbols.

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Paul Ricoeur’s work intends to be “in the truth” and that intent is to a great degree fulfilled in a century where a dualism of conflicting blocs(Analytical or Continental)(Science v Religion)(Science v Philosophy)(Psychology v Philosophy)(East Europe v The West) contributed to the phenomenological demand that description and explanation of phenomena must have a dialectical structure demanding a methodology of dialectical logic. Finding a position in relation to the above, conflicting factions must have been a difficult undertaking, but no one can doubt that Ricoeur found a position worth defending. Ricoeur’s effect on Continental Philosophy was very similar to the effect of Wittgenstein’s Later work on Analytical Philosophy. Both succeeded in different ways in removing the academic focus of Philosophy from Natural Science in favour of the Human Sciences and the Humanities. Ricoeur’s relation to both Aristotle and Kant, however, is problematic and a Kantian interpretation of Ricoeur’s work, for example, would undoubtedly result in a negative review. This is not particularly surprising given the massive influence Hegel’s work had at both the close of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. Aristotelian/ Kantian Logic and Metaphysics all but disappeared from the Philosophical agenda in the early part of the 20th century.

The more personal influences upon Ricoeur included Brentano, Husserl Jaspers, Heidegger, Nabert, Marcel , Freud, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. The result of these historical and personal influences was a Philosophy of Action armed with a hermeneutical method to interpret both action and more abstract traces of action. Ricoeur, in his turn, would not at all be sympathetic to those working in the tradition of an empirical dualism of action and belief. Neither would he be interested in any form of transcendental rationalism in relation to the topics of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness, and Action.

One of Ricoeur’s key thoughts in this context is his claim that Consciousness is not self-evidently available in any epistemological process of introspection but is rather a task–something one accomplishes or achieves–thereby placing Consciousness immediately in a broader ethical context. It is no doubt the case that this is, in broader terms, a phenomenological move that aims not to complement theoretical reasoning about truth, explanation, and justification, but rather replace it with practical accounts of intentionality. This theoretical aspect remains unacknowledged in spite of the above claim to be “in the truth”. In perceiving, for example, that Pierre is not in the cafe, we would argue that this is only possible if Consciousness registers the truth of the Perception at a higher level of mental activity than that of Sensibility. For the phenomenologist, however, sensibility in concert with the imagination is sufficient to produce the bare perception of the empty cafe. The element of “negation” in this account is produced by the imagination in contrast to the truth-condition account, in which thought, in the form of an expectation, and in relation to an outcome of expectation, have to become part of the conscious “logical” or “conceptual” response to the “materials” of perception(whatever they are). Perhaps it is correct in the above circumstances to claim that the major task of Consciousness is practical and related, for example, to the wish to greet Pierre once again, converse with him, walk home with him. To claim, however, that in these circumstances the truths that arise in relation to this experience are largely incidental, would be problematic for both Aristotle and Kant and all who follow them. Or is it that in just this case of Pierre not being in the cafe both Aristotle and Kant are right in their contention that the most important moment of this experience is the emergence of the belief that it is true that Pierre is not in the cafe. Sartre would not subscribe to such a position of course, because he believed that the noetic act involved in this experience is a Nothingness simply because of the fact that Pierre is not in the cafe. For Sartre, the key to understanding this event is not in terms of the rational faculties of understanding or reason but rather in terms of an activity of the Sensible aspects of our minds involving the imagination. Ricoeur, insofar as the noetic– noema relation is concerned, views the noetic in terms of intentionality related to a task whose nature is not transparent to itself and must be interpreted in terms of the objects the task is related to.

Ricoeur insists that a hermeneutic method is needed to complement the phenomenological techniques of “reduction” and “bracketing”. Underlying the instrumental functions of texts, works of art and monuments are the above mentioned untransparent intentionalities that need to be “revealed” or made manifest. In Ricoeur’s position, there are also traces of Marcel and Merleau-Ponty who in their turn may have been influenced by Spinoza’s Philosophy. The idea of an incarnate “lived” body plays an important role in the unity of the subject and object in our experience. In the context of this discussion, it is important to point out the difference of this conception of the body in comparison with that of Aristotle who used the principles of sufficient reason and non-contradiction to arrive at a definition of man that would be rejected by Marcel, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Ricoeur. For Aristotle phenomenological investigations, in attempting to “arrive at” essences through their methods, would fall into the category of activities in a context of exploration that was not sufficiently steered by the principles that one finds are operating in contexts of explanation/justification.

One of Ricoeur’s goals in his work is to make the abstract more concrete and reference to an incarnate body is part of this process as are his conception of acts of Consciousness. These elements, suggestive of dualism, are important components of Ricoeur’s exploration of the Lebenswelt of Man, the most important aspects of which are characterised in terms of the desire to be(eros) and the effort to exist(conatus). There is more than a hint of Hegelian “Spirit” present in these reflections but there is also more than a hint of an “archeological” intent to return to the origins of things. The task of hermeneutics, of course, is to reconcile these different faces of Janus into one profile and attitude. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics is, it has to be stated, largely guided by “suspicion”, not just in terms of what is abstract but also of the manifest meaning of phenomena. Language is important to Ricoeur’s investigation, especially the use of language that he designates as “symbolic” and which one encounters in both the avowals of self-confession and narrative texts. His hermeneutics reveals that there are aspects of man’s Being-in the world that are latent and suggest a form of fallibility that is related to the essential characteristic of his finitude. It is man’s ability to “transcend” his finitude and fallibility that constitutes his freedom to choose to act. This freedom interacts with nature and a world of phenomena(a world of meanings). But for Ricoeur freedom is not an idea of reason but rather “reveals itself” in its acts and dealings with objects. It is actualised and made into something real, actual, and concrete. This for Ricoeur is something that can be captured in an imaginatively structured narrative containing symbolic language in which meanings relate to meanings in a dialectical structure of “hiding/revealing. Hermeneutical interpretations constitute, then a context of explanation/justification very different to that which we find in Philosophical Science, Ethics, and Philosophy. Indeed Ricoeur recommends that we use this phenomenological/hermeneutic context to diagnose how the concepts of science and action, for example, relate to the intentional structures of an incarnate Cogito. Empirical descriptions of objects and events are transformed in this act of diagnosis and something “latent” is “revealed”. When actions and events are narrated they are done so in both archaeological and teleological terms: there is an archeological aspect in which the pathological flaw in man’s being is “discovered” and a prospective teleological vision or moment of Transcendence is “hypothesised”: a moment in which one realises it is possible to be freed from the involuntary burden of this flaw. The Delphic Oracle is, of course, committed to a view that synthesises both these archeological and teleological aspects. This is summarised in the words “Know thyself” which is to be interpreted in terms of that other oracular pronouncement that “All things created by man are destined for ruin and destruction”. From the point of view of the avowal of the evil one suffers or does, this confession may not be merely an epistemological matter but also a moment of catharsis, a stage on the road of freedom toward transcending nature. For Ricoeur this dialectic of Nature and Freedom is to some extent resolved by “reflecting upon” the conflicts of various interpretations of mans actions or deeds. Reflection, for Ricoeur, is characterised (defined?) as the appropriation of our human desire to be(eros) and effort to exist (conatus) through the objects, works, texts, monuments, and deeds which bear witness to this desire and effort. Texts are mentioned and the Bible is obviously one such text. Texts like the Bible, according to Ricoeur, speak of the world ” at the level of reality”(“Biblical Hermeneutics” in Semeia 4(1975)). Does this mean at the level of knowledge? These texts certainly speak about the soul or the self, which Ricoeur characterises in the following way:

“I mean a non-egoistic, non-narcissistic, non-imperialistic, mode of subjectivity which responds and corresponds to the power of a work to display a world.”

This world is, of course, revealed via representations that are the consequence of acts of will and their associated intentions, decisions, expectations etc. In Ricoeur’s view, Phenomenology is a descriptive discipline that does not suffice to provide us with a sorely needed explanation/justification for what are essentially noetic acts. Pure description gives rise to conflicts of interpretations that require the resolution of the discipline of hermeneutics. Involved in this process is the use of dialectical logic of the kind one can encounter in the work of Hegel. Such dialectical logic is the work of the “Spirit” at the level of the formation of a concept rather than a rational logic whose”material” is propositional and whose aim is truth and knowledge. Ricoeur’s methodological investigations, however, take us from the so-called objective sphere of “meaning” to an existential level where we are faced with the mystery of the body incarnate. This transition distinguishes Ricoeur’s work from that of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger. Ricoeur’s criticisms of the existentialism of Heidegger refer to how quickly Heidegger arrives at the question of the meaning of Being. The answer to this question, Ricoeur argues, requires the “explorer” to take a longer perambulatory route via works, objects, texts, etc. His longer route via the dialectical conflict of interpretations and the “act” of reflection is partially aimed at avoiding the abyss of transcendental solipsism that Husserl, other phenomenologists and existentialists, and the early Wittgenstein found themselves confronted with.

Merleau-Ponty’s work “Phenomenology of Perception” was similarly a work that rested upon the ground of the solipsism of the “lived body”. It also practiced a form of what Ricoeur called “diagnostics” on a number of scientific experiments in the field of Psychology, re-interpreting them from the point of view of a first-person embodied consciousness: a consciousness practically and emotionally involved in its lifeworld. Ricoeur adopts a diagnostic approach to both Scientific description and action description. This diagnostic form of phenomenology imposes on the biological account of man (in terms of a number of internal functions relating to an external environment). an account that is suggestive of Aristotle’s actualisation process of a life whose telos could well be described in terms of Ricoeur’s existentialia, namely the desire to be and the effort to exist. Modern Biology conceives of the will in terms of the movement of an objective body. The chain of causation, however, ends at the terminus of the motion and thereby leaves a lacuna in any account that demands an explanation or justification for the motion. This lacuna Biology fills with behaviourist theory which views the world as a totality of causal stimuli operating upon this biological entity or physical body composed of a totality of functions. The whole process is thereby dissolved into a pool of variables without values. Sometimes these two approaches(Biological and behavioural) seek assistance from Cognitive Psychology(especially in therapeutic contexts). Called upon to provide a description and explanation of an author writing his book, word, by word, sentence by sentence, chapter by chapter, the cognitive functions of memory will be invoked to explain the intentions of the author forming these curious stimuli on the printed page of a book that will be read by readers using their imagination, emotions, and reasoning to “interpret” these stimuli. The idea that stimuli, behaviour, and cognitive functions will be sufficient to explain this form of aesthetic activity is, of course, a forlorn one. The idea of “action” is a phenomenological idea and perhaps would be a more appropriate approach to the question of Being, especially if it is conceived in terms of the phenomenological notion of an embodied consciousness. Action flows from a body, through a body and out into the external context of a world which that consciousness confronts with awe and wonder prior to subsequently understanding what it confronts.

We should note here, however, that it is somewhat ironic that Aristotelian Hylomorphism can give adequate descriptions and explanations/justifications of the above cultural phenomenon of the interpretation of a text without involving the middle term of consciousness between the terms of life and Rationality. Instead of this “middle term” of consciousness, Aristotle provides us with a framework of cognitive powers and capacities such as perception, memory, imagination, language, judgment, understanding, and reason, as well as practical powers of desire, intention, and action. Being-in-the-world is for Aristotle to be fully explained in terms of the above framework that is appealed to in his theoretical, practical and productive sciences.

The above would not suffice for Ricoeur who believes that there is a fundamental “rupture” in the fabric of human Being, a rupture partly caused by the presence of “thought” or the “I think” as it inhabits the mysterious incarnate body that produces “phenomena” such as intentionally directed effort and desire manifested in Action. Ricoeur’s work “Freedom and Nature” is one long investigation into this mysterious idea of a body that belongs to both the realm of nature in which the world appears to merely “happen” to the body and the realm of freedom in which the power of the will flows through the body into the world and changes it in accordance with ideas in the mind of the agent. Ricoeur begins his investigation by pointing out:

“To explain is always a move from the complex to the simple.”

This is undoubtedly a good starting point but it probably is meant to refer to the tribunal of Nature whereby Laws, Principles, and Universal concepts explain natural phenomena in terms of causal relations, tribunal that Ricoeur prefers to “bracket” in accordance with his phenomenological methodology. Yet there is another kind of tribunal related to “Action” and the type of “laws” in that tribunal belong in a context of “Justification” rather than “Explanation”, a context that is virtually absent in the account that is given of effort and desire. In such a tribunal the “simple” is justified in terms of the law and something that is “judged” to be not in accordance with the law is “judged” to be breaking the law. This is Kant’s Ethical and Legal tribunal and it works with the ought-system of concepts that is in turn connected with the natural world of facts in which promises, for example, are made with the intention of either being kept or not. These are the simple facts of Being-in-the-world. The judgment that “Promises ought to be kept” is a universal ought judgment that justifies the judgment that particular(simple) acts of promising ought also to be kept. It is from such elements that deontological ethics is created. Ricoeur, in his work “Freedom and Nature” claims that we should not begin our investigations into action with the above kinds of Justification but rather should begin at the “simple” level of description of voluntary action. In order to create a climate of “conflict”, Ricoeur uses the language of the contraries “normal v pathological” and he claims that the “normal” (natural) takes precedence over the pathological(which is unnatural). Here Ricoeur is clearly suggesting that the assumption of what is “natural” is a necessary condition of understanding what is unnatural. In Ricoeur’s “phenomenological tribunal of explanation”(rather than justification) the practical Cogito generates instrumental imperatives that look as if they are the result of the “language of power” given the embargo on practical justification in terms of rational principles and laws. Ricoeur also uses the language of “the will” in his tribunal and he claims that “to will” has essentially three meanings: to decide, to consent, and to move. To decide, however, would appear to take us into the arena of rationality because what is deliberated upon in this rupturing “world of thought” is the Kantian Reason for any action undertaken. In the Kantian Tribunal, once the complex has been decided, the process of thought returns to “Being-in-the-world” and the reason is transformed into the cause or the motivation for “acting”(not merely for “moving”). Underlying voluntary action, Ricoeur, argues, is an involuntary aspect of action that Ricoeur believes is the element of the decision of the will on the basis of the effort and desire involved. This domain of the will, Ricoeur claims, is not accessible to empirical science which attempts to “objectify” the incarnate body by cleansing it of its form of life(psuche). For Descartes, this “catharsis” of the body ceased only when it was finally reduced to a zone of geometrical extension. In this form of Cartesian substance-dualism the possibility of understanding the relationship between the physical nature of the world and the nature of “forms of life” significantly diminished. Ricoeur rejects this form of epistemological dualism yet seeks to understand the involuntary structures of the human form of life through the lens of what he calls the “integrated Cogito” which he characterises in terms of an “I” that “decides”, “intends”, and “can”. This appears to be an attempted resolution of the problems of substance-dualism with a form of dual-aspect-ism that in turn involves substituting a dualism of perspectives for a dualism of substances. The “can” involved in our “effort to exist” relates not to a purely physical body of cells, organs, and limbs but rather to an experienced body, a form of life. The movements of this body are viewed in accordance with an integrated Cogito that becomes “symptomatic” of a will that is conceptually or logically related to the notion of Action and the Reasons for acting that give such Action its meaning. This cannot but remind us of the Freudian strategy of theorising. But for Ricoeur involved in the meaning of Action is the earlier reference to the “rupture” that occurs in our Being-in-the-world caused by “thought”. When we survey life forms of the humankind philosophically(in the context of explanation/justification) it seems inevitable that “thought” or the “I think” must play a key role in relation to “I can” but this Kantian moment is not directly acknowledged in Ricoeur’s account. The desire to remain at a concrete descriptive level of “existence” is obviously partially responsible for this reluctance to move from a context of exploration to the context of explanation/justification. Such a move must reveal the importance of the idea to the purely physical motion of an “objectified” body. Furthermore, it is this relation of thought or the idea to the movement that is somehow related to Reality or existence. In Ricoeur’s view, conceptual thought of the Kantian kind involves an unnecessary abstraction from this, for him concrete form of existence. Such a loss of Being involves, from his perspective a cutting oneself off from Being. There is no appeal to a transcendental subject in Ricoeur’s reasoning. Consciousness itself, because of its power of judgment needs however, some kind of relation to the Spinozistic conception of “the idea of the body as the first idea of the mind”, however vague this form of consciousness might be. It is in this ambiguous realm that Ricoeur seeks to present the paradox of Freedom and Nature. For Ricoeur, it is an important methodological condition that neither of these two notions can be derived from the other. It is this paradox that is partly behind the methodological requirement of reflection in which we must appropriate entities within Being-in-the-world, including our bodies and subject them to hermeneutical acts of interpretation. This is the point at which Ricoeur’s thought turns to the phenomenology of religion and its concept of “Original Sin” in order to further explain the rupture or flaw in man’s Being.

Historically, the Pelagians and the Gnostics denied this conception of Original sin in the spirit of Aristotle. Kant, in the light of centuries of discussion also denied the coherence of an idea that negates the absolute good will of ethical action. Kant denied Evil as a Substance and placed it in the category of an active choice that could always be otherwise. Evil, that is, for Kant, belongs in the domain of action and ought judgments and for Kant, it is, therefore, a contradiction to regard man as an Evil or flawed form of Being. Judgments of Evil must attach only to action on Kant’s account. The evil man, that is must invert the moral law to justify his choice to systematically make himself an exception to the moral law. Kant does, however, admit to the propensity toward evil which he claims is self-evident in all our experiences of man. Even Adam, Kant argues, was presumed innocent until a free choice constituted his “fall” into sin. No strictly causal account could explain this potentiality as arising from previous evil actions of historical beings. Kant clearly stands with the Pelagians and the Gnostics on this issue. If his account is correct, what then, is the status of a confession of sin? Is it a cry of complaint at the heavens? Or an appeal to some divine influence to save me from a flawed state of Being? Or is it a cry for self-knowledge to assist me in saving myself from future problematic choices? The interesting starting point in the discussion of this question is to ask how an agent could possibly “know” that they are “originally” sinful or in their nature sinful beings.

Ricoeur would object to such a starting point directly. He points out in an essay entitled “Original Sin: a Study in Meaning”(Conflict of Interpretations, ed Ihde, D, NWUP,Evanston, 1974):

“The Gnostics…tried to make this question a speculative one and to formulate an answer to it that would be knowledge, Gnosticism”(P.271)

Ricoeur claims that it is the first task of the Christian(which was his faith) to combat the Gnostic position. St Augustine we know dedicated himself to the battle against Gnosticism, Pelagianism, and Manichaeism. In his responses to these positions, St Augustine raised the level of reflection associated with the theological problem of free will from the level of mythical symbolism( working through the medium of images) to the level of rational symbolism( working in accordance with Neoplatonic or Gnostic speculative theories). Ricoeur argues, that Evil for Gnosticism is a substantive reality that like a virus or bacteria infects man from the outside. The “fall” of the soul occurs in relation to this “substance”. “Falling” is of course not an argument but an image as are other “symbolic presentations” of evil such as “losing one’s way”, or “missing the target”. Evil “Satanises” the cosmos, Ricoeur argues. The image of infection is countered in a behaviour of cleansing intended to “purify” the soul of the infecting substance. In this primitive image, mans salvation does not come from within but depends upon an external deliverance. Ricoeur’s response to these diverse images is to claim that the question “What is evil?” is poorly formulated and ought to instead read “Whence comes the fact that we do evil?”(P 273). This suggests a return to the realm of action and freedom but unfortunately, it does not entail a return to the Kantian form of rationalism in which appeal is made to rational conditions. Ricoeur takes us out of the realm of mysterious substances and into the realm of ethics, only not into the realm of Kantian ethics.

St Augustine acutely saw in the confession of Evil the presence of the impossible concept of “nothingness” and for him, this was sufficient to remove the concept of evil (knowing “nothing”) from the grasp of Gnosticism. If evil was a nothingness then it appeared to be beyond even the act of creation which worked in the realm of something. The Greeks invented the idea of the Demiurge to avoid this implication that something can come from nothing. It was out of reflections in this realm of metaphysics that the rational concept of Original sin was forged. We are born, it is argued, in a state of sin, in a state of moral deficiency. Without a notion of the inheritance of sin, however, Original Sin would not have the continuity needed to be asserted of the species even if the time period imagined was a matter of mere millennia(as St Augustine postulated). Pelagius was very much on St Augustine’s mind during this period and St Augustine could not bring himself to embrace the notion of freedom we find much later in Kant’s Enlightenment Philosophy. Kant’s Philosophy is a Philosophy that maintains man chooses to sin and it is this that ruptures the theological fabric of Creation by the presence of something he creates entirely out of his own power. This power was viewed by St Augustine as a nothingness. Instead of man becoming the free centre of his own fate we are asked by St Augustine to conceive of the inheritance of habit, guilt, and punishment from the moment of his birth–on the grounds that something (sin) cannot come from nothing. God is thus exonerated of the act of the paradoxical creation of evil as man now stands in the theological tribunal indicted for crimes long committed. Only such a conception, of course, could justify the punishment of almost the whole of mankind by a flood in a narrative that not only suggests the possible beginning of time but also the possible end of time for time. Such a world did not require the existence of worldly tribunals and laws to justify rationally what obviously seems to be punishment. Such a world required instead temples, churches, men of God, prayer, and a forlorn hope that all will be well in the end. Pelagius and his individual will must have seemed to St Augustine to be Satanism incarnate. Pelagianism suggested, of course, that evil shall be “judged” and given the obvious fact that nothingness cannot be judged it must have a source not in our nature but in our will which is not a nothing but a something, namely a cause of itself(as Kant was later to claim). This something for both Aristotle and Kant embodied a law or principle that clearly pointed to what we ought and ought not to do. Neither of these Philosophers, by the way, would invoke Consciousness in the way that Ricoeur does:

“The consciousness of sin is not its measure. Sin is not my true situation before God. The “before God” and not my consciousness of it is the measure of sin. That is why there must be an other, a prophet, to denounce sin. No becoming aware of myself on my part is sufficient, all the more so because consciousness is itself included in the situation and is guilty of both lies and bad faith.”(P 282)(Conflict)

Insofar as the Ancient Greeks were concerned(including Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle), there was, to say the very least, an interesting relationship between the gods, oracles and the law of the city administered by officials and massive juries(500 men). Recall that Socrates was condemned judicially for basically a religious offense. The laws and the gods lived in a sort of symbiosis, that we moderns do not enjoy. For us, the gods have departed(Deus Absconditus) and their thrones stand empty. The voices of the oracles have also ceased and we are left alone with the laws of the city and our own wills and consciences. This suffices for us to judge ourselves in good faith in an inward tribunal in accordance with the Moral Law of Kant. Ricoeur would, as can be seen from the above quote accept none of the above accounts in the spirit in which they are offered. We are, according to his account, as a matter of concrete fact guilty of both lies and bad faith. Kant would not deny that experience reveals these facts to us but experience also reveals the facts of the judgment of these lies and bad faith. It might be true that we are guilty of the above sins and in extreme cases, there may have been those whose hearts have been hardened “like the spots of a leopard”(P.287) but just as you cannot deduce an ought from an is so you cannot deny the logical priority of the ought over the is, where the issue is one of the Principles of the Good and the judgment of actions by this standard. The image of the man with a heart hardened by the evil he has committed and for whom the voice of conscience has disappeared is characterised in Old Testament narratives by the very physical image of bondage, captivity, or slavery. The Bible clearly speaks of the price of sin being the loss of freedom, in terms also of exile, wandering in search of the promised land. Myth and the Biblical writings reveal to man the spirit of Aletheia, a Universality in the life-world that would later be reflected upon by both Pelagius and Kant in almost Socratic fashion. The worldly tribunals do not cry to the heavens via their avowals of unworthiness but carefully, like Solomon, weigh the available evidence and make the relevant judgments, viewing themselves through the lens of a Freudian super-ego. This was the realm of the sacred for Socrates. Evil begins with me Kant argues. It is a rupture of the logical space of the sacred. We are our own judges and we ought to be. For Ricoeur, on the other hand, it is Evil that is at the heart of the involuntary that in turn forms the foundation of all that is voluntary. For Ricoeur, we are in the realm of the imaginary but Kant would reject this in favour of a logical and conceptual analysis of the phenomenon of Evil. This analysis could not, as a matter of logic focus on nothingness(in the language of substance) but rather on a principle of evil that becomes normative for a phenomenal life that does not possess the universality of the principle of the Good governing a noumenal life leading to a state of grace in which there is a divine guarantee for the summum bonum (the good of a flourishing life). This latter state is, of course, the final context of justification over which one’s will does not reign but must humbly accept as a judgment upon one’s life if one has does all that one can do in terms of acting on the moral law. In this final context, judgment relates to continual moral progress and this is what we are bound by duty to strive for. If this progress continues for long enough we will find ourselves in the realm of the “sacred”. Here, the third question of the four that define the scope of Philosophy for Kant is “What can I hope for?”. This question has the answer sketched above. We see that the answer given to this question is categorical and not hypothetical, unconditional rather than conditional. This is the realm in which, for Kant, knowledge has to give way to the logical space of faith that speculative reason, according to Kant can neither prove nor disprove. The absolute in this system is, of course, the good will, not the empirically good will (which as a matter of fact hopes for a good life) but rather a transcendent will that claims to be worthy on objective grounds of leading a good life. This unconditional hope is not grounded in the imagination or the senses of Sensibility but rather in Practical Rationality and the logic of normative principles. In such a worthy life the grounds are to be found in a timeless noumenal realm.

Kant, in his work “Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason”(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, trans by Wood, A, and Di Giovanni, G, 1998) discusses the role of an institutional church in a faith:

“grounded in empirical, historical conditions and shapes a church Kant calls “ecclesiastical faith”(P XXXI)

This so-called historically based “ecclesiastical faith” must for Kant be a secondary process in relation to the primary process of the principle of rational morality that requires a moral education of the kind we discussed earlier in this volume(Kant “On Education”). We know that Aristotle proposed a public system of Education which in Königsberg during Kant’s lifetime to some extent existed. Aristotle’s demand for such a form of “universal education” would have included education in his three realms of Science: Theoretical science, Practical Science, and the Productive Sciences. For Aristotle and Kant, it was obvious that knowledge played a decisive role in whether or not one led a flourishing life. Furthermore, for Aristotle, this education would need to actualise the potentiality all humans possess to become theoretically and practically virtuous. Virtue in Greek is often translated as areté which also means doing the right thing in the right way at the right time. Kant would largely agree with the above account but would offer his categories of judgment and the Principles of Reason(Sufficient Reason and Non-contradiction) as improvements upon Aristotelian Hylomorphism and Metaphysics. Ricoeur would to some extent disagree with both of the above positions on grounds that deny the importance of the role of reason and logic as the primary processes of thought. Ricoeur, on the contrary, regards, what Kant would claim to be a secondary process of thought, namely a dialectically structured narrative, as the primary process that enables us to understand Being-in-the-world. He would, that is, insist that the imagination is the unconditional ground of freedom and rationality. This would place though– that “rupture” in mans Being-in-the-world– in the realm of concrete Sensibility. Passions and emotions are also, of course, located in this realm. The will is both practical and emotional. Ricoeur, claims the following in his work “Freedom and Nature”:

“Each passion is a form of the human totality. Real concrete understanding of morality begins with the passions. “The good that I would I do not and the evil I would not I do”. this mutual dependence of the passions and the law is central; in the context of the fault, passions and the law form the vicious circle of actual existence.”(P.21)

This reflection falls fairly and squarely in the context of exploration designed to question the harmony of a human psuche operating on the laws of Sensible functioning. These passions and laws then potentially actualise into a human psuche operating on the principles of rationality and logos.

Much, of course, depends upon how one chooses to characterise the flaw in our existence. Ricoeur, in this context, makes his position clear:

“we shall call upon a consideration of the fault to destroy this myth of harmony which is a lie and an illusion of the ethical stage par excellence”(P.22)

This Greek measure of harmony does not, according to Ricoeur, sufficiently characterise the contrary to the experience of the sacred. It is this fault that bears the burden of invalidating the moral law and situates the source of the ethical in the Kantian faculty of Sensibility, or the Aristotelian domain of pleasure-pain. In a sense, Hylomorphic theory integrates the powers of Sensibility into the higher mental powers of judgment, understanding, and reason. Perhaps it is possible as Ricoeur does, to claim that Sensible states are states of deficiency but only on the grounds that they follow different principles that regulate sensible powers such as perception, memory, imagination and some levels of emotional discourse. Freud characterised these Sensible principles in Aristotelian Biological/Psychological terms: an Energy regulation Principle(ERP) that regulates organs and limbs and the Pleasure Pain principle(PPP) that regulates all emotions and passions. For Freud, the higher mental powers are regulated by the Reality Principle(RP) that embraces both the principles of non-contradiction and sufficient reason. In the light of this elaboration upon the context of explanation and justification, it can be maintained that there is no Greek myth of harmony but only Greek rationalism that eventually served as a foundation for Kantian Metaphysical and Transcendental Philosophy. Neither of these forms appeals to dialectical logic as a form of explanation or justification for either ethical or religious phenomena. Indeed Kant thought that dialectical logic was an “illusion”. Both Aristotle and Kant would, however, probably acknowledge the importance of this “logic of negation” at the level of concept formation or determination, thus situating this intentional activity in the sphere of the imagination that lies at the gateway between the faculty of Sensibility and the faculties of the Understanding and Reason. This domain of the imagination includes the symbols we find in myths and the concept of “truth” that is operating in myth–a concept probably best articulated by the Greek term “Aletheia”. Symbolic uses of language are also located in narratives about the beginnings and ends of time and evil. The rhetorical form of such narratives is often that of tragedy bordered by a rational Hope that lifts one out of one’s Lebenswelt and into Greek and Kantian contexts of explanation and justification. For Ricoeur hermeneutics is necessary for the interpretation of the above tragic texts. His interpretations, it can be argued, leave us standing “before God” rather than as Transcendental subjects in the tribunal of the law of our own construction. This tribunal is not for the judgment of transcendental solipsists but only for Aristotelian and Kantian rational animals capable of discourse capable, that is, of forms of judgment and an understanding that in their universality and logical necessity make no distinction between different individuals in different spatio-temporal contexts. Any fault that is discovered in the proceedings of such a tribunal has not occurred at the beginning of history but rather as a consequence of an individual’s choices and decisions.

Ricoeur further commits himself to embed ethical value and indeed all value in relation to action in the faculty of Sensibility by claiming:

“I reflect on value in the social context of praise and blame”(Freedom and Nature P.72)

For Aristotle, there is an emotional and social origin of aesthetic and ethical value but virtue is nevertheless a matter of rational judgment, a matter of areté, of doing or saying the right thing in the right way at the right time. The scope of this judgment extends over the definition “rational animal capable of discourse”: from social etiquette in discourse to more complicated forms of instrumental and categorical action. Describing everything that is happening at a particular time in a particular place may or may not be relevant to the context of explanation/justification. Contexts of ethical justification are normative, relate, that is, to what it is we ought or ought not to do and for which there is subsequent praise or blame. Descriptions of how things are, could never be normative in the sense of being constitutive of principles(these descriptions can at best illustrate or exemplify these principles). Descriptions of what people do, e.g. making a particular promise at a particular time may be relevant as a minor premise in a chain of premises in the context of ethical justification. The major premise of such a chain must, however, be normative, must be, that is, an ought premise, e.g. “Promises ought to be kept”. It is, however, difficult to imagine that what any agent involved in this situation is feeling(as Ricoeur suggests) could be a premise in such an ethical chain which has to reflect what someone is doing or intending to do. How one feels about keeping ones promise or not, is a matter of causal relation and not a rational relation. What one is feeling might, however in this particular situation, explain why one did not do what one ought to have done, e.g. keeping a promise one has made. I might have promised to pay some money back I owed, but spend it on something I wish to buy for myself instead. Here my self-centred emotion or passion for spending money on myself is a cause for my doing what I did: pleasures and pains cannot be reasons for actions.

Aristotle differentiated the goods of the body from both external gods and the goods for the soul. Furthermore, three kinds of forms are transmitted in cultural contexts. Firstly the biological forms of children, secondly, the instrumental forms of artefacts(houses, roads, fields, cities, etc) and the more categorical forms of knowledge and ethics(transmission of intellectual ideas from the various sciences). In this respect, the emotions and passions are more relevant to the goods of the body than external goods or the goods of the soul. Kant spoke in terms of happiness here and accused those motivated by happiness of following the principle of self-love that sometimes is manifest and sometimes is latently disguised. When we are considering the goods of the soul there is clearly the possibility of a Platonic moment where one can choose to exchange one’s life for categorical values such as knowledge or justice. Is the description, exchanging one’s life correct? Is it not rather a matter of transcending one’s life, a matter of living in a timeless noumenal world in which reality is viewed sub specie aeternitatis? This is a world or Kingdom of Ends in which Promises ought to be kept. In this context, Ricoeur claims that “affectivity is a form of thought”(P.86) If this is the case then we must be dealing with an experience-based thought. It might be true, for example, that I am feeling anxious about keeping my promise but it does not follow that everyone in this situation must feel anxious. For many good men keeping ones promises is second nature(not something that is given a second thought).Thought, for Ricoeur, is the source of rupture or a fault in my Being and one wonders whether the anxiety or guilt behind our avowals of evil is what is at issue here. The primary emotions or desires for Aristotle and Kant were awe and wonder felt in the face of the world and in the face of one’s moral personality. Anxiety, as a matter of fact, may prevent my desire to explore the world or the desire to understand the world but this is a brute fact that at best provides us with an “explanation” in terms of Negation: an “explanation” which requires a dialectical process of reasoning rather than the deductive form of reasoning that we encounter when using the principles of non-contradiction and sufficient reason.

The above “affective turn” or “affective revolution” that Ricoeur encourages, has the consequence that we turn our focus away from the world and the principles of moral action and toward what is occurring in my body/mind. A form of Cartesian apperception or consciousness is assumed to justify the move from being something we merely describe to something that serves as a sufficient explanation of phenomena. The body’s needs may well motivate (cause) the will to act in accordance with the pleasure-pain principle and imagination of the object of the need. Imagining the object that satisfies my need is presenting an object to a quasi-observational form of consciousness(in the absence of the object). Negation appears to be at the heart of this project of Sensibility. The presentation referred to above is related to the pleasure-pain principle via the fascination for the imagined object. Ricoeur believes controversially here that imagination is connected to knowledge:

“But the level of meaning of imagination remains knowledge…It is as knowledge that imagination which swells our desires is susceptible to coming under the control of the will and that our life itself can be evaluated.”(P.99)

The meaning of the above remark depends on whether the issue is one of the relation of the will to the goods of the body, external goods or goods of the soul. The terms of evaluation will differ. In the first case, the pleasure-pain principle is one of the principles regulating bodily activity. In the second case happiness(the principle of self-love in disguise) uses a rule of prudence as the norm to evaluate the happiness seeking activity. In the third case, purely categorical, unconditional, rational principles constitute any activity relating to the goods of the soul. With respect to the goods of the body and external goods, if areté is not operating in the soul there is a risk that we will become victims of our own vanity(narcissism). If this is the case, the proliferation of desires will be unregulated. The soul uses emotional mechanisms such as shame or guilt to overcome the temptations of vanity or narcissism produced by an unruly imagination searching for pleasure. Pleasure is, of course, merely a sensible effect of an action. According to both Plato and Aristotle, however, there is a form of pleasure that is related to learning and the form of philosophical reflection that is linked to understanding and reason, (to the Reality principle rather than the pleasure principle associated with the goods of the body and the sensible forms we encounter in the external world). Ricoeur’s contribution to this debate is to suggest that pleasure and pain occur in perceptual object relations where pleasure supervenes with successful relations and pain with problematic relations(P.100 F and N)

Pleasure relates then to motivated action via Sensibility which is an important component of desire. Objects of the imagination can be objects of desire and to the extent, that anxiety enters into the experience, we appear to be dealing with either the Energy Regulation Principle or the Pleasure-Pain principle. Now the desire to understand, connected with learning and philosophical reflection is free of pain and anxiety because it is not directed at objects of desire but rather occurs through the mediation of concepts and principles(e.g. the Reality Principle which includes the Principle of Non-contradiction, Sufficient Reason, Areté, etc). The Pleasure involved is, therefore, a contemplative pleasure unrelated to pain( the great regulator of the sensible body). Ricoeur points out in this context that pleasure and pain are not opposites. He does not point out, however, that they operate on different principles. Pain is more deeply embedded in the organic body and tends to produce activity of the limbs and organs that are both reflexive and defensive. This is probably one of the few dimensions of “psychic” activity where behavioural theory has something significant to contribute.

Anxiety is imagined pain of a general kind: it is fear of suffering that can reach the levels of terror accompanied by the bodily response of trembling. The reflexive activity produced can also be of the defensive or “affective” kind. Courage in the face of this fear or anxiety is an example of the will imposing order in relation to this situation. Here areté takes the form of self-control and we have an example of doing the right thing in the right way at the right time. Courage in the face of an extreme threat to one’s well being is undoubtedly an important virtue and involves the operation of a form of rationality directed at one’s own body and/or the external world. The above reflection that pleasure and pain even at the organic and bodily level are not opposites is explained in terms of each having its own opposite: the true opposite of pleasure is deprivation and the true opposite of pain is merely its disappearance, its absence from the body and its absence from the imagination.

We are accustomed as a result of the analysis of emotions from the point of view of analytic Philosophy to define the emotions in terms of three criteria: bodily reactions, emotional behaviour, and emotion-inducing circumstances, and the extent to which these criteria are controllable is the extent to which the ideas we have in relation to them are in Spinoza’s language “adequate ideas”. Being terrorised by a ghost is being terrorised by one’s own imagination. Ghosts do not exist but ghost inducing circumstances and the physiological responses to these circumstances do exist. A Ghost is notwithstanding a projection, possibly assisted by strange sensory circumstances and perhaps strange intensive emotional ideas of having failed the dead people in one’s life, or alternatively longing intensively for a lost loved one that is no longer alive. On a Hylomorphic-Freudian analysis, ghosts are projections of an unstable mind caused by the defensive operations of the ERP and the PPP.

Pleasures attached to the goods of the external world that we are related to are subordinated to a prudential form of rationality that aims at my temporary well being or happiness but these goods can, of course, be arbitrarily removed by forces outside one’s control (Cephalus of the Republic lost his fortune) This kind of situation, for Aristotle meant that such goods were not categorically under our control. Such goods, in other words, are not like the goods of the soul such as knowledge and areté. These cannot be removed from my life by external forces. The prudential imperative, on the other hand, aims at commodious living, and the comfortable living standard of homo oeconomicus championed by Hobbes et al was an attempt at politically and ethically universalising this standard. Here we clearly see a conflict between external goods and the goods of the soul. Initially, this “liberal” philosophy seeks the “conservative” life via the accumulation of capital(Adam Smith) but in deconstructing the values of the soul and disregarding Principles such as areté we find nothing for governments to do except for distributing taxes justly and exercising power over other governments and territories. Historically, as early as Plato we have been made aware of the close relationship between the accumulation of capital and violence. In the Republic, Socrates tells us about the frustrated children of the oligarchs sitting idly in the agora plotting the downfall of the oligarchy in the name of “demos”(the population). In these kinds of conflict, we see the Platonic/Freudian giants or Eros and Thanatos engaging with each other. Once power becomes the topic of political discourse in the agora, ruin and destruction are natural consequences. The problem, of course, is that we have found no means of universalising the oligarchic life, something that Plato realised at the time he was constructing his Republic of Philosophers who were not allowed to possess money or live in a family. Socrates is also reputed to have argued that oikonomos was an art and not a science but it was moreover a secondary art that ought to be subservient to the primary arts and sciences such as music, medicine, and philosophy.

Kant’s contribution to the above debate was to point out that we humans antagonistically respond to the fact that, not being fully rational, man needs a master but he does not want a master. Out of this cocktail of needs and wants grows:

” a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.”

As Hobbes acutely observed. Freud gives us an explanation for this state of affairs in terms of the “instincts” of Eros and Thanatos. Were these propensities not a part of our cultural scene(which is what Plato, Aristotle, and Kant thought) History would not be what it is, namely a list of one tragic fact after another. Ricoeur believes that economics and political power are not linked in the way that Plato, for example, suggests. He claims that if History were left to Homo Oeconomicus all conflict would take the form of relating to our well being or its negation. This may be an artificial division of instrumental imperatives because it is Plato’s contention that the restless desire that ends in death emanates from the negation of well being(suffering). The agenda of Greek democracy that erupted in violence and tyranny was for Plato a direct result of accumulating power and accumulating capital, an agenda that emerges when a secondary art usurps the spirit of the primary arts regulated by areté. For Plato, Philosophy and the art of education were fundamental to the role of the knowledge of the good necessary to prevent the city-state from falling into a state of ruin and destruction. The Platonic figure of Eros is a problematic political figure padding about the city without knowing exactly what he searching for, knowing perhaps only what he does not want, namely, an untimely and early death. This suggests a Socratic connection between Philosophy and Death, namely that Death brings Philosophy to an end, emphasising the importance of the body to the mind. Socrates, we know, had an opportunity to escape Death but his training or his education would not allow him to do so given his belief that the future of Philosophy is more important than life itself and demands the ultimate organic sacrifice. The examined life, that is, demanded that Socrates become obligated to his principles, thereby placing principles on the agenda of Philosophy in a way that Plato and Aristotle would consolidate in their different ways. Kant also believed that the examined life or the Aristotelian contemplative life demanded an obligation to the categorical imperative or moral law:(because of its universality: so act that you can will that the maxim of your action become a universal law). Leading such a life obviously demanded an obligation to actualise the law in concrete situations( e.g. treat people as ends in themselves). This latter also embodies the unconditional attitude associated with the foundation of Practical Reasoning in the domain of ought concepts. The Kantian introduction of the practical idea of freedom into this domain was, of course, a far more important revolution than the famous “Copernican Revolution”, because it displaced a very theoretical conception of God with the real source of ethics, namely the Good Will viewing the world sub specie humanitatis, as a free being.

Even if it is the case that man does not want to be mastered by Reason he understands the consequences of his power over others and their power over him. He understands that he is free to choose the principles by which he lives. He also understands that Freedom is an ultimate unconditional categorical freedom to cause himself to do what is right in the spirit of Areté and to believe what is true and justifiable in the spirit of Aletheia. He is a Being that respects his own freedom and the freedom of others to have moral acts constituted by the moral law. Less abstractly he is a Being that has respect for himself and others as ends-in-themselves. Here, in these two formulations of the moral law(the formal and the material), we have what Ricoeur denies on P.132, namely the hylomorphic interpretation or actualisation of moral action governed by Reason. Ricoeur also appears to believe that Reason is somehow “detached” from Desire, detached from, for example, the desire to understand. This desire is central to both the Aristotelian and Kantian accounts.

Involved in the conflict we have outlined between Kant and the Hermeneutic method is a different conception of concrete experience. Evil is not merely empirically real as is the case with Kant. For Ricoeur, evil symbolises an ontological flaw in Being human, it indicates a Negation that is “real” and not merely a consequence of an actualisation process or the failure of powers to actualise(Aristotle). Kant also references the Aristotelian idea of potentiality in the following quote from “Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason”:

“the propensity to evil is a deed in the (noumenal) meaning.”(PXIII)

Yet we shall remember that Kant in his Groundwork claimed that the only absolute in moral action is a good will. In the light of this point, the propensity to evil must, therefore, be in some sense, a “secondary” deed motivated by a different principle that may well have narcissistic aspects which operate to disturb the balance of the mind. Such a being disturbed by his narcissism, upon being judged by the Tribunal of De Civitate Dei will not merely be judged for his empirical deeds and beliefs but will also be called upon to justify himself as a human being. Here the issue is far more important than the issue of legal guilt: the issue is one of deeds that flow from a principle that has hardened the will against the good. This then leads to the theological problem of moral guilt. Kant is largely silent about what kind of punishment or sentence could be meted out in the theological context, because he does not believe in a utilitarian God. Perhaps in terms of theology, the worst judgment that could occur in the noumenal realm of the divine tribunal is the proclamation that the defendant is not a “human being” but has become the archetype of something else difficult to describe, something that lacks the absolute attribute of a good will.

The trial of Eichmann commented upon by Hannah Arendt is relevant to consider in this context. Arendt’s “judgment” on Eichmann(that he lacked the capacity to think) at first appears to be underestimating the magnitude of the crimes against humanity that Eichmann was found guilty of, but such a response may be in its turn underestimating the power of thought in our lives. The Jewish response to Arendt accused her of not recognising the scale of evil involved in Eichmann’s actions. Arendt’s teacher was Martin Heidegger and he too was accused of minimising the political intentions of the Nazis when he joined the Nazi party before their agenda became clear to the world. Both Philosophers are existentialists and had difficulty formulating an ethical theory to oppose that of Kant’s(as was the case for the Existentialist Sartre who was forced into the Marxist camp of fascism to justify the lack of ethics in existential theory). Paradoxically, therefore, the Jewish response could be seen in Kantian terms, seen, that is, to be emphasising the dimension of the sacred noumenal realm of Being which empirical evil violates. Kant would certainly have judged Arendt’s response to be very “theoretical”. It comes as a surprise to some to learn that Kant, the Enlightenment spokesman for Freedom, was in fact in favour of the death penalty for very serious crimes which presumably would have included Eichmann. Kant was a Christian, however, and we should also recall in the context of this discussion that Jesus claimed that there are crimes so great that those who commit them should have a millstone placed around their necks and dropped into the sea. We should also appreciate however that the kind of judgments we humans pass in our worldly tribunals in response to empirical evil would differ from the judgments that would be passed for crimes against the noumenal world. Ricoeur believes that rationality is not capable of “revealing” anything about the realm of the sacred. Our only access to this realm is through “interpretation” of our avowals of evil, sacred works, and texts all of which relate to our existence, that is, to effort to exist and desire to be. What, however, are we to do with murderers who confess their empirical deeds which violate the noumenal sacred realm of our existence? Kant might believe in the death sentence for people who commit heinous crimes but given the reliance of the categorical imperative upon the test of non-contradiction, an implication of someone using the powers of their life to take someone else’s life away in an institutional context is clearly a contradiction and must, therefore, be problematic for whoever it was that was going to carry out the death sentence. In the case of Socrates, the poison was given to him to drink and technically he died by his own hand. It is clear in any case that this kind of violation of the realm of the sacred by murderers suffices to deny their humanity.

But what about the forgiveness of sins, especially from the point of view of Christianity? As was indicated above some sins are more sinful than others. The keeping of promises was important for Kant and breaking of promises threatened the valuable human institutions of promising and truth-telling but on Kant’s account, such sins could be forgiven although there is no duty to forgive them. No one, however, would suggest that death should result from such a breach of the moral law.

Ricoeur’s criticism of Kant is grounded upon a conviction that Kant is primarily concerned with epistemological problems:

“The basic limitation of a critical philosophy lies in its exclusive concern for epistemology: the only canonical operations of thought are those that ground the “objectivity of representations”…..A single question rules the critical Philosophy. What is a priori and what is merely empirical in Knowledge? This distinction is pure and simply transposed into the second critique–the objectivity of the maxims of the will rests on the distinction between the validity of duty which is a priori and the content of empirical ideas.”(Freud and Philosophy p.44-5)

It is questionable whether an “exclusive concern for epistemology” is a reasonable criticism of Kant’s essentially rationalistic approach to both Science and Morality and his concern to chart the extent of the different domains of metaphysics associated with theoretical and practical reasoning. The questions “What can I know?” and “What ought I to do?” are clearly distinct questions covering the domains of knowledge and action respectively, and to suggest that Kant merely transfers an arbitrary structure from one domain to the next is a failure to appreciate the extent to which Kant’s philosophy was, in fact, a return to the practical commitments of both Aristotle and Plato. It also is a failure of Ricoeur to realise the extent to which Kant was a hylomorphic Philosophy, where the spectrum of powers building upon powers included epistemic powers but these were in no way paradigmatic for the Kantian critical Philosophy. Reason for Kant is both theoretical and practical and his contexts of explanation and justification are similarly theoretical and practical where in one case the telos is the truth and in the other “the good”.

Both philosophers interestingly use the idea of symbolism and here again Kant’s interest is not primarily epistemological given the fact that the dynamically sublime is defined in terms of an appreciation of one’s moral agency in the face of the threat of the power of nature. If anything, an accusation of an obsession with Cartesian epistemology might be a reasonable accusation to direct at Ricoeur’s Philosophy, which seeks to arrive via the long route of dialectical interpretation, at the Cartesian first truth “I think, I am”. Ricoeur focuses, for example on the cognitive operation of Reflection that he defines in terms of Existence and that we can only appropriate through an interpretation of the works(including texts) and monuments of our culture. Ricoeur is aiming at a long dialectical context of discovery which he believes will come to an end at the terminal explanation/justification of the truth of the Cogito. We should recall that Kant’s program in his critical Philosophy was to combat the exclusive agendas of both the rationalists(including Descartes) and the empiricists(including Hobbes and Hume) as well as the prevailing influence of Neo-Aristotelianism(Aquinas) which in fact resembled Aristotelianism only superficially. I offer a criticism of Ricoeur’s approach to Kantian aesthetics in my doctoral dissertation entitled “Reflections and Elaborations upon Kantian Aesthetics”:

“Reflection requires a work to be set up opposite to it in order to give rise to thought. These works are in a sense contingent because they belong to a culture but they are also caught up in a web of necessity since, without the interpretation of these works, there would be no attempt to appropriate or understand our effort to exist and desire to be. Many Kantian terms are used in the course of this account of the work of reflection. There is talk, for example of a Transcendental logic whose job it is to give an account of the notions presupposed in the constitution of a mode of experience and its corresponding mode of reality. Such a logic, it is argued, is necessary because reflection has to do with a dimension of discourse which is not amenable to examination in terms of a traditional logic which prizes argument, definition, classification, ahead of investigations into the conditions of possibility of an experience.”(P.83)

Ricoeur appears to suggest that the context of explanation/justification does not relate conceptually or logically to the context of discovery/investigation. In Kant, the immediate intuitions of experience are necessarily or logically connected to concepts if they are part of an act of judgment. In a discussion of symbolism Kant claims that intuitions can either be schemata of concepts or alternatively be symbolic of those concepts, be, that is, indirect presentations of the concept. Schemata relate to the way in which reason demonstrates the relationships of concepts in judgments using these concepts. Here, the unity of apperception, or the “I think”, performs the task of unifying various manifolds of intuition into one logical entity. Symbols, on the other hand, use, what Kant calls “analogy judgment”(P.222 Critique of Aesthetic Judgment):

“in which analogy judgment performs a double function: first in applying the concept as the object of a sensible intuition, and then, secondly, in applying the mere rule of its reflection upon that intuition to quite another object of which the former is but the symbol”(P.222)

In the above quote, Ricoeur’s objects of reflection(objects which demand an explorative interpretation) are not present because for Kant Transcendental Logic is the only reflective tool that can be used to judge the conditions of the possibility of experience and its relation to reality. Ricoeur’s idea of a symbol that requires an explorative interpretation is similar to the structure of a work or text which also possesses a symbolic structure. Obviously, not being conceptually constituted, symbols can not be captured by a definition. There could, that is, never be a dictionary of symbols. The structure of symbols is a structure of a manifest meaning and a latent “lived” meaning. This “lived meaning” is related non-conceptually to our effort to exist and desire to be. Neither of these accounts of “symbol” is epistemological. Neither philosopher believes that we are dealing with an entity that is related to epistemological judgment or understanding. Ricoeur admittedly has a more complex account. Symbols are related to discourse, and discourse in its turn is rooted in our existence(in our effort to exist and desire to be). It will come as no surprise to a philosopher to be told that existence takes many different complex forms that require a number of different interpretations. There are at least three types of symbols, argues Ricoeur, namely cosmic symbols, oneiric symbols, and poetic symbols: each reveals a realm of existence that is important to Philosophy. Cosmic symbols focus upon natural elements such as the sun, the moon, and the waters of the earth. These elements, Ricoeur argues, (though it is not clear on what grounds) acquired meaning for us perhaps even before we began to linguistically represent them. Yet it is only when they are represented linguistically that they give rise to thought and presumably are susceptible to interpretation. The oneiric dimension focuses upon psychic conflicts that presumably manifest in phenomena such as pathological behaviour and dreams. It is in dreams, in particular, Ricoeur claims, that we can discover how cosmic significations are transformed into psychic functions. The poetic dimension reveals a vision of the world. It is not clear whether Ricoeur means to include mythical texts in the category of the poetic. Both kinds of texts(poetic and mythical) appear to be related to the power of nature to signify and the power of man to transcend both the power of nature and his own sensible experiences of the world.

Mythical texts perhaps differ from poetic texts to the extent that they imitate important aspects of our life that have to do with beginnings and ends of nature, life, etc. In myths, events and characters are woven together into a dramatic structure:

“with three characteristics. Firstly a myth contains a person or people universally representative of the human condition as such. Secondly, it sets up a time through the tension of a beginning moving towards an end which is representative of all times. Thirdly it points to the way in which man is alienated from his essential nature. These characteristics together disclose the enigma of human existence and provide us with sketches of solutions to that enigma.”(P.85 Reflections and Elaborations.).

These texts project a world, Ricoeur argues, in a similar way to the way in which a world is projected in dialogical discourse. In such discourse, it is not another psychological entity that I understand but rather a new way of Being-in-the-world. Written texts take up this project and transform it, “rewrite reality”, and in so doing reveal a reality “more real than the reality of the everyday world”(P.87). Yet is important to reiterate that the way in which a text projects a world is not, Ricoeur argues, susceptible to any logical demonstration or conceptual definition. In opposition to Kantian reflections upon symbolism, Ricoeur invokes Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment. He appears initially to agree with Kant that judgments of taste are about individuals occurring in the context of techné (not epistemé). These judgments, when directed at texts are not merely about the words or sentences of the text but rather a synergistic combination of these elements. This whole, then, invites an interpretation in terms of what Ricoeur controversially calls a “subjective logic”(whatever that means) in which we attempt to “guess” the intentional structure of the text”. Apart from this last questionable reflection, many of Ricoeur’s reflections are in fact elaborations on Kantian themes but there is nevertheless only a superficial resemblance between the two accounts of symbols.

There is, however, much in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment to suggest that Kant’s idea of what he calls ” a feeling of life” aims at an existential foundation similar to that characterised in Ricoeur’s idea of existence. The effort to exist and desire to be, suggest a restlessness of the mind which would seem to be excluded in the relatively peaceful state of the contemplation of the beautiful. The mode of experience of the Dynamically Sublime, however, meets many of the requirements of Ricoeur’s reflective exploration:

“Being present at the site of a powerful waterfall induces in us a feeling of our own puniness in the face of the power of nature. If it is the case, however, that we are in no physical danger and no pragmatic considerations interfere with our reflections, our mind inevitably moves to a consideration of our own worth as moral agents–something which is not threatened by the forces of nature. The supersensible of our faculties, the imagination and desire are involved in a complex work of reflection.”Reflections and Elaborations P.89)

This clearly indicates the presence of freedom, an idea of reason, a component Ricoeur would have doubts about. Non-schematic sensible presentations are, according to Kant subjected to moral characterisation as when for example trees and landscape are described in ethical terms, e.g. “stately”, “Majestic”, “innocent”, “modest” etc. This ethical language use also runs contrary to Ricoeur’s accusation of a Kantian prejudice in favour of epistemological criteria. Kant specifically claims that beauty is the symbol not of any epistemological phenomenon but rather the realm of morality.

In further reflective explorations, Ricoeur reveals that symbols can evolve and have a history. Evil, can, for example, be represented by images of a spot or a stain, progress to an image of a broken relation(losing my way missing a target) or finally the image of being burdened like a slave under one’s own guilt. This gives the symbol of evil a trajectory over the time of civilisation, a movement from something infecting one externally to an interiorisation: a movement that perhaps reflects an underlying metaphysical movement. This trajectory, namely, also points to a shift in our relation to God: from making an avowal or self-confession “before God” to the avowal occurring in the thought space of an individual–in the logical space of Deus Absconditus.