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The Translator’s(Kelbley, C., A.,) Introduction to this work notes the role of Gabriel Marcel’s thought in relation to Ricouer’s reflections:
“Gabriel Marcel stated that we live in a world which seems founded on the refusal to reflect. On several occasions he insisted that the fate of Philosophy and civilisation are intimately related, implying that the philosopher does not have the privilege of abstaining from participation in the crises of his epoch. Surely, there is no need to underscore the role of existentialism and of phenomenology in the “persistent unyielding struggle against the spirit of abstraction”(Les Hommes contre l’humain(Paris, La Colombe, 1951)
Both of these movements, phenomenology and existentialism, are motivated by a desire to return to things themselves or existence itself. Such a desire appears to arise from the belief that abstract thought has no signifiant philosophical content and allows anything and everything to be thought in abstraction from what is actually happening in the world. The constraints of the the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason do not appear to suffice for the phenomenologists and existentialists to create the “special meaning” they seek in their reflections upon our “being-in-the-world”: whether it be the world we represent or the world we aim to change via our voluntary acts of will. Kant, in the name of the Enlightenment, felt the need to tear down the medieval metaphysical towers of reflection clouding the philosophical landscape and further urged that we, in our philosophical reasoning return to the Aristotelian notion of the metaphysics of “first principles”.
Hegel, in the course of “turning Kantian Philosophy on its head” rejected the above principles approach in favour of a dialectical method that regarded any principle as just another “thesis” waiting to be countered by an anthesis and thereby become part of a synthesis which as part of an ever growing circle would become a new and equally provisional thesis waiting for rejection and the beginning of another dialectical process. The effect of this Hegelian discussion was to refocus philosophical reflection on “Meanings” and “Interpretations of meanings” as well as the idea of “Spirit”. This latter idea referred to a succession of spiritual ideas which have the effect of expanding the “field of self-consciousness”. Spirit is divided by Hegel into the realms of Objective Spirit, which covers the domains of economic, social, moral, political and historical aspects of being, and Absolute Spirit, which covered the domains of art, philosophy, and religion. This account separates the arenas of the moral from the philosophical and this requires special explanation as does separating the political concern for justice from the “absolute” concern of Philosophy.
We argued in an earlier work : “A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness, and action”( Lambert Academic Press, Mauritius, 2019-2022) that History is intimately related to the principles of truth and knowledge in a way that will not be overturned by a dialectical spirit of teleological meanings forging into the future. This relation to principles acknowledges the past above the future and also involves a moral metaphysical import that will be related to the journey of the ages toward a Kantian cosmopolitan “kingdom of ends” in which both freedom and rationality will play important founding roles. These ideas will, for Kant, be important founding ideas of the political/religious telos of our “Being-in-the-world”: a telos Kant equates with a “hidden plan” of progress. Both Art and Religion, in Hegel’s view merely symbolise the “Absolute”, whereas Philosophy is the final spiritual outcome of what Ricoeur calls the “work of civilisation”. It is of course difficult to fathom how philosophical reflection could be unrelated to the political and moral dimensions of our existence, in the sense of presenting us with the “first principles” of justice and freedom, and also in the sense of how these “principles ” could be unrelated to the “principles” of History, truth, and knowledge. The Aristotelian/Kantian methodology of approaching phenomena from the perspective of what explains/justifies them is rejected by both Hegel and Ricoeur in the name of “unmotivated rationalism”.
The Aristotelian/Kantian conception of the law/principle is an organic conception that applies not just to the phenomena associated with psuche, but also to phenomena such as the transformation of villages into cities. For Hegel this kind of teleological transformation is an “abstract” process that will only reveal its true nature at the end of this process of “actualisation”. In such circumstances when the “end” cannot be used to explain “why” one did what one did, the focus shifts to the means to the end, which literally, on Hegel’s account of the march of spirit, could lead anywhere and everywhere. For Hegel, the only “principles” that can be abstracted from such a theoretical account of agency and action are those that Arendt focussed upon as the means or concern of the “new men” of the modern age, namely “everything was possible”(for a few) and “nothing was possible”(for the masses). It was these “maxims” that enabled those in power to mobilise the masses in favour of the “Obsessions” of those in power with “violent” solutions to problems requiring more abstract and rational/contemplative solutions. The “alienation” of the masses allowed the philosophy of the “will to power” to emerge as the motivating factor for “popular” governments. Knowledge and rationality as characterised by ancient Greek and Kantian thinkers were marginalised in favour “phenomenological description”. In particular, the Kantian metaphysics of morals and its associated political character was reduced to dualistic or materialistic accounts of phenomena requiring action-related explanation or justification rather than event-related explanation or justification. Hegel speaks in terms of world-historical individuals and world-historical events embodying world-spirit, rather than in terms of the action related ends-in-themselves we find in the Kantian idea of the kingdom of ends.
The major theoretical tools of Aristotle and Kant are of course the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason and these contrast starkly with the major theoretical tool of Hegelian dialectical logic which is Negation. For Aristotle, for example, it is not clear how the “organic” transformations from family-life to village-life to polis-life can be meaningfully conceptualised as movements of “negation”. Certainly a city is not a village and a village is not a family but this truth is limited in its meaning because a village is a collection of families and a city is a collection of villages and the relation of the family to the village and the village to the city is both an “organic” and a “practical” relation: a collection of families is a necessary condition of forming a village and a collection of villages is a necessary condition for the forming of a city. The fully formed entities of the village and the city are constituted of both necessary and sufficient conditions that are presented as part of the principle of sufficient reason. On page 156 of the work “A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness and Action”, Vol 2, the following claim is made:
“There is no doubt, for example, that, for Aristotle, Normative life is naturally and rationally tied to the successive actualisation of powers and capacities of the “rational animal capable of discourse” and also along this continuum of actualisation there will be biological, social, and political manifestations of animality, discourse and rationality.”
The powers involved are potentialities of “psuche”(defined in terms of the “rational animal capable of discourse”) and have little in common with either the theoretical power of negating a thesis in order to expand ones field of self-consciousness or the “recognition” of ones self as a consequence of the synthesis involved in a dialectical process of negation.
This of course is a position that has little in common with the individual understanding we have of individual objects that is so important for the account that Ricoeur favours. Abstraction in the form of universal reasoning, Ricoeur argues, removes us from this sphere of the understanding of individual existence. The life of an individual is always singular and cannot be captured in the general formulae of rationality and this is why the primary category of investigation is “meaning” and why the context of exploration/discovery always takes precedence over the context of explanation/justification.
Ricoeur poses the question, “How can the events of History be meaningful if one is to maintain an understanding of their singularity and unrepeatability because of the unique position they occupy in the continuum of events that follow one another in a linear sequence in which successive events provide the “meaning” for the events that have occurred previously.” For Ricoeur, there can be no “objective history” without subjectivity, no universality without singularity. Singular existence can occur without being conceptualised but this power presupposes that several or many individual things possess something in common that can be represented on more than one occasion. This power of understanding conceptually, however, is one of the primary powers of thinking that prepares the sensible powers of perception and imagination for the act of representation in concepts that in turn categorise intuitions with a view to synthesising these elements into truth-conditional representations/judgments. Ricoeur criticises this Kantian picture of understanding by claiming that the task of truth is connected to nothing more than an ontological hope which cannot possibly “know”that the end one arrives at is truly explanatory or justificatory. What is further needed, Ricoeur argues, to explain the singularity involved in existential experience, is ” an active participation in the mystery of my body”. This position connects to that presented by Merleau-Ponty, in his work “The Phenomenology of Perception” where it is clear that the body is locked into a perspective or point of view that cannot be transcended in signifying acts. Man, on this view, is a “flawed creature”. Meaning is achieved by a so-called, “creative interpretation” of this “broken unity” of man. In true Hegelian fashion Ricoeur regards the meaning of History as ambiguous, resting on a “feeling” of a hope which cannot be founded upon what he describes as the “violent” synthesis of the truth..
The above reflections do not amount to a critique of civilisation, a theme that appears to have disappeared from a Phenomenological radar system that has been designed to detect “singularities”. The reduction of self-consciousness to a singularity possessing singular powers waiting for the “end” of action to “dawn” belies the Aristotelian-Kantian “abstract” accounts in which a transcendent self-in-general is endowed with abstract rights and responsibilities. We will not turn to narratives for an account of such a transcendental self but rather to the kind of tribunal that we find in contexts of explanation/justification. In such contexts we encounter complex accounts of phenomena relating to individual powers embedded in three media of change(space, time, matter) four causes of change, and four kinds of change, all of which relate to three principles of change which in their turn rely on the logical principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. The kind of narrative that informs us of the dialectic of the master and the slave, ending in a moment of “recognition” in a context of conflict, is certainly a phenomenological exercise articulating a life-space concretely. The response of the later Wittgenstein to such a “phenomenological reduction” was to insist that the philosophical challenge was to provide an account that concerns itself with what he called “the possibilities of phenomena” rather than an account that concerns itself with their actuality or existence as brute facts. We can of course in concrete narratives “interpret” the intentions of actions but in so doing we should be careful to note that we are not finding linear causal connections between two concrete events, but rather we are giving a conceptual account of the relation between an intention and an action.
Ricoeurs conception of the self of self-consciousness shares some of the Hegelian animus but it does begin at an existential level and reduces the complex repertoire of mans powers to the effort to exist and the desire to be as manifested in the works of man. Ricoeur regards society as flawed and this fact manifests itself in the exploitation of work by society. In the preface to the first edition of “History and Truth”, Ricouer characterises his position as follows:
“I believe in the efficacy of reflection because I believe that mans greatness lies in the dialectic of work and the spoken word. Saying and doing, signifying and making are intermingled to such an extent that it is impossible to set up a lasting and deep opposition between “theoria” and “praxis”. The word is my kingdom and I am not ashamed of it. To be more precise, I am ashamed of it to the extent that my speaking shares in the guilt of an unjust society which exploits work..I believe in the efficacy of instructive speech: in teaching the history of Philosophy….As a listener to the Christian message, I believe that words may change the heart.”(P.5)
Ricoeur, too, like Hegel, raises the question of the objectivity of History and warns us of the danger of “global interpretation” of History. He also resembles Spinoza in his focus on the understanding of individual singular objects. There is an unmistakeable antipathy toward Reason and what Ricoeur calls its “presumed and pretended unity”(P.10) The conflation between theoria and praxis we encounter in the above quote fails to recognise the ontological distinction (recognised by both Aristotle and Kant) between The Good(in the arena of action) and The True(in the arena of events and their linear causation). The Phenomenological Reduction thereby brackets the world (that we categorically understand and reason about) and limits discourse to being about “things themselves” rather than the doing involved in the action of “making things true” and “making things better.”