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Ricoeur begins his essay by defining the problem, as he sees it, of “modern universal civilisation”:
“The problem is this: mankind as a whole is on the brink of a single world civilisation, representing at once a gigantic progress for everyone and an overwhelming task of survival, and adapting our cultural heritage to this new setting. To some extent, and in varying ways, everyone experiences the tension between the necessity for the free access to progress and, on the other hand, the exigency of safeguarding our heritage. Let it be said at the outset that my thought does not result from any contempt for universal modern civilisation: there is a problem precisely because we are under the strain of two different necessities both of which are pressing.”(P.271)
This is a fascinating introduction raising a whole host of further questions relating, firstly, to the correct way in which to characterise this “single world civilisation””(as a zone of comfort and security made possible by technology or as a Kantian Kingdom of ends or an Augustinian city of God?) Secondly , how does it go about safeguarding its heritage in the three very different case mentioned above. Thirdly, whether there is progress toward a kingdom of ends would be a very difficult matter for even the eagle-eyed study of history to establish, given Kant’s claim that the kingdom of ends lies at least one hundred thousand years in the future. Given that span of time there is space to accommodate what Arendt called a “terrible century”(the 20th century) without abandoning the Kantian philosophical conviction that progress is being made.
Ricoeur continues his reflection by intuitively focussing upon one of the major difficulties of conceiving perspicuously of our situation: the pretension of the spirit of science to endow civilisation with a universal character. Modern science appears to express itself best in terms of the consequences of its theory, namely technologically. This is not the case with Greek science in which the spirit of techné is connected to areté(doing the right thing in the right way at the right time). The use of epistemé in Greek science is also involved in the science of nature, but in a different way to the way in which it is in the ethical/practical context of explanation/justification of action. Ricoeur poses the question: “”is Science Greek in its origins and European, through Galileo, Descartes, Newton etc.” One immediate response to this question is to point out that Greek science had a more complex relation to Mathematics than its modern counterpart. It is common knowledge that both Plato and Aristotle and presumably also Socrates believed Mathematics to be a discipline whose basic “objects” are “images” and whose definitions are “explanations” of the nature of such images, e.g. a straight line is the shortest distance between two points”. The epistemé of Plato and Aristotle was not constituted by mathematical operations but rather by principles(arché) regulating activities ranging over, not images, but rather objects, causes and individual actions. The problem with the inclusion of Mathematics in the scope of Greek epistemé is that it relates only to the physical reality/substance that is most amenable to quantitative operations. This categorical assumption becomes, however problematic because quantifying actions for the purposes of forming images does not answer questions relating to actions that are not classificatory/descriptive, but rather explanatory/justificatory in nature. There appears to be a confusion of what-questions with why-questions in many attempts to introduce mathematics into domains of concern requiring other forms of explanation.
Machines, Ricoeur argues, are merely more sophisticated tools requiring more technical thought for their production and use. Universality, in the sphere of techné, means, he claims, that as soon as an invention appears in one place in the world it can be spread over the whole globe. This is one consequence of globalisation—an ethically-neutral form of cosmopolitanism: we support the whole world in principle, insofar as possessing mobile phones is concerned, but not atomic weapons of mass destruction. Ricoeur, in the context of this discussion prefers to ignore Kantian Cosmopolitanism and he claims, somewhat controversially, that the first philosopher to reflect upon the universality of the state was a in fact Hegel. He claims:
“Hegel is the first to have shown that one of the aspects of more rationality, and at the same time, of his universality, is the growth of a state which institutes laws and develops the means for their enforcement in the form of an administration.”( P.273)
Aristotle’s definition of practical rationality, and its fundamental connection to the creation and maintenance of laws in the city, is also being ignored in Ricoeur’s praise of Hegel. Ricoeur does, however, insightfully fixate upon the importance of the concept of power, and he claims that once a certain level of comfort and security is reached we see authoritarian power-structures transmute into democratic power-structures. There is a case to be argued, for the position that democratic power structures make the exercise of power more difficult and tenuous, and Ricoeur claims, again insightfully, that one possible response to such a state of affairs, is to attempt to personalise power. This fails to appreciate the Aristotelian position that the greater the number of people that there are involved in a discussion of an issue over which a decision has to be made, the better the quality of the decision.
Ricoeur, then, moves the discussion on to a consideration of what he calls somewhat paradoxically “the rationalisation of power”, which he believes is connected to the bureaucratic administration of a government function. This process of administration involves research and investigation into the possibility and consequences of particular issues related to potential government decisions. Such research and investigation takes place in a combined spirit of exploration/discovery, and explanation/justification. In the former context, we are dealing with hypothetical investigations and technological imperatives, and in the latter we are more concerned with the categorical relation of conditions to their unconditioned arché. Both processes aim to provide us with a global picture of the means to ends , the ends in themselves, and possible “good consequences”. In such governmental investigations, calculation of all forms takes pace in the combined spirit of exploration/discovery and explanation/justification. The former context focuses upon instrumental and technological imperatives guiding decision and reasoning -processes. The latter context, on the other hand, tends to focus on ethical/political categorical imperatives claiming both universality and necessity, in tribunals that resemble processes of justice more than experimental discussion groups attempting to come to agreements based upon hypotheticals.
Investigations into economical problems involve the quantification of economic events and their consequences. There is, in our modern era, a danger that economic matters dominate the political landscape, and economic means to political ends become the favoured form of “rationalisation”, thus eclipsing the ethical and political substantive arguments required by rational political actors, for whom the term “rationalisation” carries negative connotations. Ricoeur refers to the categorical idea of a good-in-itself, and basically uses a Kantian Cosmopolitan view in his discussion of the “dangers” confronting mankind when major shifts of values occur:
“But the massive access of men to certain values of dignity and autonomy is an absolutely irreversible phenomenon, a good-in-itself. We are witnessing the advance onto the world scene of great human masses who were heretofore silent and down trodden…..a growing number of men have the awareness of making their history, of making history: in tis sense we can say that these men are really joining the majority.”(P.276)
Hannah Arendt referred to the problem these masses caused in the rise of totalitarianism in her work “The Origins of Totalitarianism”. It was, she argued during the “terrible 20th century” when political parties failed to appeal to these “mass-interests”, that we witnessed the quick dissolution of old fragile democracies. This illustrates well what Ricouer goes on to say concerning the destruction of traditional values in the process of their “universalisation”. The destabilisation of nation states in this process of “universal” cosmopolitanism obviously brought with it hidden dangers for the whole world. Ricoeur suggests that even the creative nucleus of the great civilisations of the past may become a victim of such turbulent unstable change involving the political mobilisation of the masses. We have argued in our series of works entitled “A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness, and Action”, that the ancient Aristotelian-Kantian “platform” of value remains submerged in the wake of the tsunami of change that swept the world in the 20th century. This tsunami had been building in size for some time since the first of the new men, namely Descartes and Hobbes, unleashed their “new ideas” upon the masses. They were then followed by Hume, Rousseau, Hegel and their followers who also rejected the nucleus of Aristotelian-Kantian philosophising. Two new structures were being constructed by these new men in a “new spirit”, based firstly, on an obsessive methodology of science, and secondly, the methodology of Phenomenology. Ricoeur does not embrace the “movement of events” inspired by the new ideas of these new men: indeed he calls the movement threatening:
“by the spreading before our eyes of a mediocre civilisation which is the absurd counterpart of what I was just calling elementary culture. Everywhere throughout the world one finds the same bad movie, the same slot machines, the same plastic or aluminium atrocities, the same twisting of language by propaganda etc. It sees as if mankind, by approaching en masse a basic consumer culture, were also stopped en masse at a subcultural level.(P.276)
Ricoeur is relying on an idea of levels of culture similar to that implied by the Kantian distinction between civilisation and culture. The idea of the “personality” of a nation rooted in its past is also invoked, but this is not a part of the Kantian reasoning. Scientific, technical, and political rationality, Ricoeur argues, requires a transcendence of both existing traditions and “personality”, in the name of this modern en masse movement. Modern political “rationalisation” is of course not rationally or ethically grounded, as was the case with Ancient Greek or Kantian Political Philosophy. Modern political thinking, rather, is a more instrumentally based, “pragmatic” affair, where much effort and time is spent on the calculation of consequences and focussing on what is sometimes arbitrarily designated as “good consequences”. Rationality and its concern with an absolute good-in-itself, would be regarded by Ricoeur as the European “illusion”, that such a good is “universal”. The consequence of such reasoning is that the rational universal grounds which we Europeans use to distinguish reality from illusion (which include both Logic and Metaphysics). is also dismissed and disqualified on the grounds of both lacking “universality” and “necessity”.
Ricoeur then raises three questions:
- What constitutes the creative nucleus of a civilisation?
- Under what conditions may this creativity be pursued?
- How is an encounter with different cultures possible?
In attempting to answer question one, Ricoeur refers to an ethico-mythical nucleus of a culture, and warns us against rational definitions of the kind we find embedded in the metaphysical positions of Aristotle and Kant. This would on the face of it appear to disqualify the possibility of adopting a universally necessary attitude to other cultures, e.g. as Kantian ends-in-themselves whose freedom and dignity(personality) should be respected. The discovery of other cultures where more particularistic attitudes prevail, e.g militaristic cultures, does not actually threaten any Kantian categorical imperative that we might use to judge such war-like societies–(what is the case is not logically equivalent to what ought to be the case).
Ricoeur calls upon evidence of clashes between cultures and primitive civilisations such as those reported in the studies of Levi-Strauss, in which these primitive civilisations find it almost impossible to assimilate the kinds of tools a culture uses, because their conception of time, space, and human relations will not allow an imaginative conversion to a consumer-comfort based form of life. The conclusion of this debate contains a reference to levels or layers which have to be phenomenologically disentangled, rather than rationally defined. Any phenomenological analysis, Ricoeur argues, must cut through to a core of basic images and symbols, which it is argued, rather surprisingly, can also be psychoanalytically described. The argument leads to a cul-de-sac in which it is maintained that the fundamental factor to consider here is that of difference–man is different to man as is evidenced by the fragmentariness of the different languages he speaks. One consequence of this kind of argumentation is that different contexts of civilisation cannot be artificially united by the unifying impulse of rationalism. Some civilisations, Ricoeur argues, will just not be able to assimilate the modern form of scientific rationality which requires a complex form of faith in which one can strive to lay nature bare to the scientific gaze whilst at the same time mysteriously embracing what is sacred to man(P.282). For Ricoeur, however, insofar as the relation to others are concerned, it is not rational respect for a categorical imperative that guides our principle based relations, but rather psychological functions such as sympathy and imagination. Aesthetics and the Arts are evoked and we are encouraged to consider the parallel of a character in a novel or theatrical play, in order to concretise what for him otherwise appear to be abstract relations appealing to a principle that he does not believe can be justified. Only a culture that uses creativity in the above way, is, Ricoeur argues, capable of giving meaning to the encounter with other cultures. We ought also to bear in mind, Ricoeur points out that our Greek, Hebrew, and Christian origins are not shared by many Eastern civilisations and the confrontation between very different kinds or origins has only just begun. It is also insisted in this connection that we do not possess a philosophy of History which is able to “resolve the problems of coexistence”(P.284) and this, we would maintain is because of the human totality, which Ricoeur refuses to acknowledge, may be a rationally constituted phenomenon.