Important:

Symbols correspond to a hermeneutics of affirmation (belief)

Dreams correspond to a hermeneutics of suspicion (critical hermeneutics of imagination)

Ricoeur on Imagination

Imagination is one of the least developed themes in the works of Paul Ricoeur. In the midst of his extensively productive intellectual output, one essay that treats significantly the theme is incorporated in one major publication consisting of collection of his essays on Hermeneutics. Adding to this burden of insignificance, the concept of imagination is held in suspect as unworthy of serious thought dues to its prejudicial connection with its colloquial understanding associated with daydreaming understood as unproductive, wasteful cerebral manipulation. Where in fact, imagination is creative and productive as claimed by Paul Ricoeur.

Imagination is a dimension of language[1] more intensively of the literary types.

******Summary of the Route of the Recovery of the Self

***** “Earlier Ricoeur had written that the subject can construct a new identioty though its commerce with self-generated figures of the imagination. The subject can experience “redemption through imagination” because in “imagining his possibilities, man can act as a prophet of this own existence.” (Fig the Sacred:7)

But imagination, informed by the descriptions of Freud is taken “as a projection of unconscious distortions and impulses, or false consciousness. The subject who thinks and feels and dreams is a “wounded cogito” riddled with illusions of freedom and self-sufficiency. Yet it must be noted that complementary to “Freud’s location of the origins of subject in false consciousness” is “similar projection of symbols and figures of a new humanity.” (FS:8)

In spite of its overdetermined origins, the imagination can activate these possibilities and offer the broken subject new modes of being in the world. (FS: 8)

The role of figurative texts in the formation of human subjectivity is the unifying theme that underlies Ricoeur’s writing. (Fig the Sacred: 14)

The Visual Model of Imagination

In his visual model of imagination, Ricoeur modifies the common phenomenological treatment of imagination related to the theory of perception[2].

In a visual model, imagination assumes the role of a vision, as a special or modified way of seeing the world. Illustrated in by such views of Husserl as a “neutralized” mode of seeing, for Sartre as an unrealized mode of quasi-seeing, and for Merleau-Ponty as a dialectical complement of seeing.

The visual model of imagination is related to the primary role granted to “description” in the phenomenological method.[3]

hermeneutic turn of phenomenology ushers in the semantic/linguistic model of imaginaion

The hermeneutic turn in phenomenology lessens the influence of the visual priority in the account of imagination instead it began to be seen as an inherent quality of language instrumental to its capacity to create meaning, what Ricoeur calls “semantic innovation”.

Ricoeur as its foremost proponent provides an impressive example of a hermeneutics of imagination. (How do we distinguish hermeneutics of imagination from hermeneutics (as an art of interpretation) of expressions (such as those of symbols, myths, narrative account, literary and poetic texts among others?)

The Symbolism of Evil (1960) introduced (commenced) a “hermeneutic” model of analysis which opened up the possibility of a new appreciation of the linguistic functioning of imagination.

Ricoeur’s series of works explored the creative role of imagination in language—be it in the guise of symbols, myths, poems, narratives or ideologies.

Ricoeur’s tentative and always provisional probing of a poetic hermeneutic of imagination, represents … the ultimate, if discreet, agenda of his philosophical project. (the hypothesis of Richard Kearney in Paul Ricoeur and the hermeneutic of Imagination: 2)

The Linguistic model of imagination

The shift from a visual to a linguistic (verbal) model of imagination is attributed to the hermeneutic problem of symbols: “In so far as hermeneutics is concerned with double or multiple meaning, it is evident that images can longer be adequately understood in terms of their immediate phenomenological appearance to consciousness.” With the shift, “Ricoeur affirms the more poetical role of imagining—that is, its ability to say one thing in terms of another, or to say several things at the same time, thereby creating something new.” (HI:2)

Important:

This concern for the hermeneutics of symbol is of paramount importance: In this regard, Kearney observes that, “The crucial role played by imagination in this process of “semantic innovation” was to become one of the abiding concerns of the later philosophy of Ricoeur.” (HI:2)

In fact, this is what will aid in confronting the aporias inherent in the field of philosophical investigation on imagination as noted by Ricoeur.[4] “The “fault”,… of most philosophies of imagination to date has been their failure to develop a properly hermeneutic account of imagining as inherently symbolizing-metaphorizing-narrativizing activity—that is, its most basic “structural feature” of semantic innovation.

Ricoeur’s critical summary of theories of Imagination

(and How the theories’ inadequate response to the problematic inherent in the imagination calls for the linguistic mediation of the theory of imagination)

Problems and confusions[5] reign among philosophies of imagination due to the bad refute suffered by the term image and to the radical equivocity at the very heart of the imaginative activity.[6]

Concerning the former reason, Ricoeur pointed out that this is the same as the as the bad refutation suffered by “psychologism” in contemporary semantics, in logic as well as in linguistics. Behaviorist psychology dismissed the image considered as mental, private, and unobservable entity. While its popularity among “popular philosophy of creativity” did not save imagination from being discredited among “philosophers of analytic tendency.”[7]

Concerning the latter, Ricoeur identifies at least four major uses of the term imagination. First, [i]t denotes… the arbitrary mention of things absent but existing somewhere else, without this mention implying any confusion between the absent thing and things present here and now.” Second, it ‘denotes portraits, paintings, drawings, diagrams, and so on, endowed with their physical existence, but whose function is to “take the place” of the things they represent.’ Third, ‘we term “images” fictions that evoke not absent things but nonexistent things.’ Fourth, it is “applied to the domain of illusions, that is to say, representations that, to an external observer or to subsequent reflection, are directed to absent or nonexistent things but that, to the subject and in the instant in which they appear to the latter, are believable as to the reality of their object.”[8]

“The theories of imagination received from philosophical tradition, far from clarifying this radical equivocalness, are instead themselves split along different lines depending on what seems paradigmatic in the range of basic meanings. They therefore tend to form univocal and rival, theories of imaginations.” (TA:170)

“The space of variation of these theories can be measured along two axes of opposition: on the side of the object, the axis of presence and absence; on the side of the subject, the axis of fascinated consciousness and critical consciousness.” (TA:170)

In the axis of an object, at one end is Hume where he relates image to perception,”of which it is but the trace, in the sense of a weakened presence.” [T]oward this pole of image, understood as a weak impression, tend all the theories of reproductive imagination.” (TA:170)

At the other end in the axis of object is Sartre in whose thought, “image is conceived of essentially in terms of absence, of the other-than-present. [T]he figures of productive imagination—portrait, dream, fiction—refer in diverse ways to this fundamental otherness.” (TA:170)

In the axis of the subject, two possible directions are indicated, “according to whether the subject of imagination is or is not capable of assuming a critical consciousness of the difference between the imaginary and the real. Here also both unfold reproductive imagination and productive imagination “to the extent that it includes the minimal initiative consisting in evoking the absent thing.” “The theories of image are then distributed along an axis, this time noetic rather than noematic, where the variations are governed by the degree of belief.

At one end of this noetic axis, where “zero critical consciousness” operates, “the image is confused with the real, taken for the real.”

At the other end of this noetic axis, “where critical distance is fully conscious of itself, imagination is the very instrument of the critique of the real.” This is best illustrated by the “Husserlain transcendental reduction, as neutralization of existence.”

Nota bene:

the variations of meaning along the noetic axis are just as much as the noematic axis.

“What is common to the state of confusion,.. and the act of distinguishing….?”

To end this ocular inspection of the problematic field of investigation on imagination, Ricoeur comments: “Such is the knot of the aporias revealed by an overview of the field of ruins that, today, is the theory of imagination?” (TA: 171)

Ricoeur also gives a hint on the direction his investigation will take: “Do these aporias convey a defect in the philosophy of imagination or a structural feature of imagination itself, a feature that philosophy must account for?” (TA:171)

On this last question, Ricoeur more likely will reply positively to both. Kearney, speaking on behalf of Ricoeur’s, points out , “The fault [or defect] … of most philosophies of imagination to date has been their failure to develop a properly hermeneutic account of imagining as inherently symbolizing-metaphorizing-narrativizing activity—that is, its most basic “structural feature” of semantic innovation.” (HI:4) Hence, it is the linguistic character of imagination that needs to be investigated more closely in order to address the aporias of imagination and the inherently creative dimension of imagination.

Linguistic Imagination (as being productive or creative imagination)

The linguistic nature of imagination emerges beginning with methodological shift to hermeneutics, similar to the one made by phenomenology, of the philosophical investigation of imagination. In this regard, Kearney notes, “The adoption of hermeneutics—as the art of deciphering indirect meanings—acknowledges the symbolizing power of imagination. This power, to transform given meanings into new ones, enables one to construe the future as the “possible theatre of my liberty,” as an horizon of hope.” (HI:4) In this sense, imagination as a creative trait of language projects possibilities of being by means of the symbolic act.

The existential implications of this approach (hermeneutics of imagination) are crucial. The age-old antagonism between will and necessity (or in Sartre’s terms, between l’imaginaire as pour-soi and le reel as en-soi) is now seen to be surmountable. “We have thought too much,” observes Ricoeur, “in terms of a will which submits and not enough in terms of an imagination which opens up.” (HI:4)

Such an appreciation of the creative role of imagination is made possible by Ricoeur’s preference for a semantic or linguistic model of imagination over a visual one. Ricoeur’s particular theory of metaphor, “invites us to relate imagination to a certain use of language, or more precisely, to see in it an aspect of semantic innovation, characteristic of the metaphorical use of language.” The same belief on the creative power of imagination is what Ricoeur maintains when he rejected the position that images are illusory: “To say that our images are spoken before they are seen is to give up an initial false self-evidence, which holds the image to be first and foremost a “scene” unfolding in some mental “theater” before the gaze of an internal “spectator”. But it also giving up at the same time a second false self-evidence, holding that this mental entity is the cloth out of which we tailor our abstract ideas, our concepts, the basic ingredient of some sort of mental alchemy.” (TA:171)

Imagination emerges out of Poesis (Literary or creative use of language: The Metaphoric model)

“However, if we do not derive the image from the perception, how could we derive it from language?” asks Ricoeur. Ricoeur locates his response to this need to demonstrate the imaginative property of language by following the direction indicated by poetic image. “The poetic image, in fact is something that the poem, as a work of discourse, unfolds in a certain circumstances and in accordance with certain procedures. This procedure is that of retentissement, reverberation…” (TA: 172) in this case, an image is a property of language in the form of a poem by means of its power of retentissement. In Ricoeur’s words, it comes “not from things seen, but from things said.” (TA:172)

Ricoeur’s theory of metaphor clarifies our understanding of productive imagination as a property of language. More particularly Ricoeur’s view of semantic innovation has such an important consequence for the theory of imagination. But imagination is here clarified by moving beyond metaphor on the level of words that is seen as a mere case of deviant naming, of using a word instead of another, that is, “metaphor is seen solely as a deviant use of nouns, as a shift in denomination.” (TA:172) Rather, the imagining process is best demonstrated in a case of metaphor approached on the level of sentence as discourse where “One must … speak of metaphorical utterance rather than of words used metaphorically.” (TA: 172)

As a form of discourse, metaphor here is understood in terms of the “use of bizarre predicates.” From the latter follows “predicative impertinence” which is purposely employed by Ricoeur “as the appropriate means of producing a shock between semantic fields.” Thus, metaphor in the form of a “new predicative pertinence” is our corresponding response to the semantic shock.

The extension of the meaning of the words commonly identified with metaphor results from the “new arrangement produced on the level of the sentence as a whole” (TA: 172)

This approach of focusing on metaphor unfolding on the level of the sentence or discourse according to Ricoeur is meant “to shift the attention from the problems of change of meaning, at the level of simple denomination, to the problems of restructuring of semantic fields, on the level of the predicative usage.” ((TA:172) It is but on the level of predication in the sentence that “the theory of metaphor interests the philosophy of imagination”, says Ricoeur. A theory of metaphor then provides a venue for clarifying the processes involved in our productive imagination. In Ricoeur’s words, “[i]t is… at the moment when a new meaning emerges out of the ruins of literal predication that imagination offers its specific mediation.” (TA:172)

Ricoeur clarifies this insight by appealing to the classic and famous remark from Aristotle: “a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars (Poetics 1459a7-8).” (172) From this statement of Aristotle, Ricoeur introduced the critical role played by “resemblance” in the metaphoric process at the level of predication. It has to be strictly observed that resemblance functions at the level of the sentence, on the level of language as discourse and not on that of words as in the case of deviant naming: Concerning the latter Ricoeur warns, “But we would be mistaken about the role of resemblance if we were to interpret it in terms of the association of ideas, as an association through resemblance (in opposition to the association by contiguity held to govern [sic] metonomy and synecdoche.)”: (172) Appropriately, resemblance on the level of the sentence is identified by Ricoeur as, ‘a function of the use of bizarre predicates. It consists in the coming together that suddenly abolishes the logical distance between heretofore distinct semantic fields in order to produce the semantic shock which, in its turn, ignites the spark of meaning on the metaphor.”(173)

Imagination in the light of the insight provided by the Aristotelian notion of resemblance is a kind of apperception, which Ricoeur describes as, “the sudden glimpse, of a new predicative pertinence, namely a way of constructing pertinence in impertinence.” (173) Again, Ricoeur stresses that the new pertinence happens on the same level of language as discourse; it restrain us from looking at it as a ornamental arrangement at the level of words: “We can speak in this connection of predicative assimilation, to stress that resemblance is itself a process, comparable to the predicative process itself. Nothing then is borrowed from the old association of ideas, viewed as a mechanical attraction between mental atoms.” It is by this reason that Ricoeur claims that imagination creates a new ways of looking at things.. or in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, “seeing as…” : “Imagination is above all restructuring semantic fields.”(TA:173)

At this point Ricoeur appeals to Kant’s theory of schematism to further advance and expand his particular views on imagination. Ricoeur is specifically interested on the two features of Kant’s theory of schematism, namely, as “a method for giving an image to a concept” and as “a rule for producing images.” (TA:173) As a method, imagination, “is the very operation of grasping the similar, by performing the predicative assimilation answering to the semantic shock.” In practice, “we are seeing as… ; we see old age as the dusk of day, time as beggar, nature as a temple with living pillars.” (173) This is how, Ricoeur admits

As a rule-producing images,

Ricoeur’s privileging of the “poetical” functioning of images illustrates his conviction that the productive power of imagination is primarily verbal.

This is best illustrated by “Hume’s empiricist account of an image as a faded trace of perception.” The theories of reproductive imagination gravitate around this axis centered on the object (which put a heavy stress on the object)

On another end, the process of imagination revolves around the subject, as “human consciousness that is fascinated and freed by its own images.” The accounts of productive (in so far as they originated from a subject) imagination in the German idealist and romantic traditions[9] move around this axis centered on the subject.

However, neither of the approaches “resolves the aporetic nature of our inherited understanding of imagining” or what Ricoeur calls “the classical difficulties of the philosophy of imagination.”[10]

Ricoeur, Paul. “The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling.” Critical Inquiry 5, 1978. 143-159.

On Resemblance

“Resemblance ultimately is nothing else than this rapprochement which reveals a generic kinship between heterogeneous ideas.” (147).

On the 3 steps in linking metaphor and imagination

“In the first step, imagination is understood as the ‘seeing,’ still homogeneous to discourse itself, which effects the shift in logical distance, the rapprochement itself.” (147)

“The next step will be to incorporate into the semantics of metaphor the second aspect of imagination, its pictorial dimension. It is this aspect which is at stake in the figurative character of metaphor. ... the way in which a semantic innovation is not only schematized but pictured.” (149)

“The third and final step ... concerns what I shall call the ‘suspension’ or, if you prefer, the moment of negativity brought by the image in the metaphorical process.” (151)

Ricoeur sees in the language’s imaginative capacity the power to mediate subjectivity for it is in the nature of language as discourse to constitute reality through its dynamic function of reference. Also, basic in Ricoeur’s thought is the understanding that subjectivity can neither claim nor aspire to be the ultimate foundation of reality nor fully constitute itself. Ricoeur rejects all hubris on the part of the subject for by itself, solipsistically alone and in soliloquy it is found wanting. Instead, the subject has to redeem itself among the expressions of the world and of itself. In Ricoeur’s words, “there is no self-understanding that is not mediated by signs, symbols and texts; in the last resort understanding coincides with the interpretation given to these mediating signs.”[11] Hence, through the hermeneutic task, recovery of the self happens.

This paper then will describe the imaginative dimension of language which posses the key towards a renewed and reinvigorated philosophy of subjectivity. Also, this paper will elucidate how hermeneutics as a thought pattern and method is best suited to assist the recovery of the self. In sum, this paper will show how the twin hermeneutical themes of imagination and interpretation assist Ricoeur’s project of reviving subjectivity.

In order to give a satisfactory presentation of its findings, this paper will indicate the direction taken by Ricoeur’s thought an outline of

Chapter one will trace an outline Ricoeur’s thought to such an extent that will enable us to trace the line of direction of this thought, as he himself indicated, a hermeneutic phenomenology. Here we will describe the main features of his philosophy, as identified by his commentators, his major preoccupation and his philosophical method. This will serve as the context in which we will elaborate our particular hermeneutic and anthropological concerns.

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[1] Mark Muldoon, Reading, Imagination, and Interpretation, A Ricoeurian Response, International Philosophical Quarterly, 61 (2001), 421-438 in http://25.brinkster.com/marcsgalaxy/imagination.htm accessed on April 18, 2007.

[2] Cf. Husserl’s Theory of Perception. “Husserl maintained that perception is under-determined: what reaches our senses is never sufficient to uniquely determine what we experience. According to Husserl, our consciousness structures what we experience and our experience in a given situation can always in principle be structured in different ways. How it is structured, depends on our previous experiences, the whole setting of our present experience and a number of other factors. Thus, if we had grown up surrounded by ducks, but had never even heard of rabbits, we would have been more likely to see a duck than a rabbit when confronted with the duck/rabbit picture; the idea of a rabbit would probably not even have occurred to us.” DAGFINN FØLLESDAL, “Ultimate Justification in Husserl and Wittgenstein, in http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~john/Follesdal-Huss-Witt.pdf accessed June 13, 2007

A duck/rabbit picture

[3] “Classical Phenomenologists practiced some three distinguishable methods. (1)We describe a type of experience just as we find it in our own (past) experience. Thus, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty spoke of pure description of lived experience. (2) We interpret a type f experience by relating it to relevant features of context. In this vein, Heidegger and his followers spoke of hermeneutics, the art of interpretation in context, especially social and linguistic context. (3) We analyze the form of a type experience.” “Phenomenology” in Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, available in http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/ accessed on June 5, 2007. p. 4.

[4] Paul Ricoeur, From Text to Action, p. 169-170.

[5] Ricoeur point to this when he warns: “A philosophical investigation into the problem of imagination cannot but encounter, right from the start, a series of obstacles, paradoxes, and stumbling blocks that, perhaps, explain the relative eclipse of the problem of imagination in contemporary philosophy.” Paul Ricoeur, From Text to Action, p. 169.

[6] Ricoeur rather speaks visually of a background discernible from the ‘repugnance felt by philosophers to provide a welcome for an eventual “return of the ostracized,” a doubt rooted more deeply than a mood or a favor of circumstance can be discerned. This doubt has been clearly expressed by Gilbert Ryle in the Concept of the Mind.” Paul Ricoeur, From Text to Action, p. 169. The contention here boils down to the accusation of ambiguity in the use of the term imagination.

[7] Paul Ricoeur, From Text to Action, p. 169.

[8] Paul Ricoeur, From Text to Action, p. 169-170.

[9] It runs from Kant and Schelling to the existentialist Sarte. HI: 3

[10] Paul Ricoeur, From Text to Action, p. 168.

[11] Paul Ricoeur, From Text to Action, Essays in Hermeneutics, II, trans. By Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (Evanston, Ellinois: Northwestern University Press, 1991), p. 15.

Paul Ricouer's Hermeneutic Phenomenology

1. Provenance of the Ricoeurian Hermeneutic Phenomenology

Paul Ricoeur is an heir to the two strands of phenomenology that have developed out of the long tradition of Continental thought. The first traces its roots from Descartes that continued its growth by way of the thought of Kant and Hegel. It finds its extreme form and expression in the transcendental phenomenology of Edmund Husserl observable from such expressions as “egology”, “intentionality”, and “structures of consciousness.” In this line of phenomenology, the thinking subject occupies the center-place. The second strand of phenomenology developed later in history more particularly in France. It adopted the methods of Husserl to aid them address the particular concern for the concrete human experience. This is evident on how philosophers like Gabriel Marcel and Merleau-Ponty addressed the problem of the body. In effect, as they utilized in varying degrees phenomenology it has become existential.[i]

Actually, not only the existentialist but also the idealist version of hermeneutics did maintain a unique emphasis upon the concrete human experience of the subject and adhere to an epistemology associated with the philosophy of perception. For instance, Husserl’s demand for philosophers to turn “to the things themselves” provides an elaboration of a theory of evidence which weighs perception over abstract theory construction. Similarly, Merleau-Ponty’s primacy of perception elaborated a phenomenological theory of perception as the basis for the whole range of human activity. In this way, both the idealist and existentialist strands of phenomenology are said to be perceptualist philosophies.[ii]

By agreeing neither to the existentialist nor to the idealist branch of phenomenology, Paul Ricoeur formulated his particular version called hermeneutic phenomenology due to the issue of language it has specifically incorporated into its inquiry moving away from the exclusively perceptualist focus of both versions of phenomenology. This linguistic turn of Ricoeur’s method is evident in his direct criticism of the idealist phenomenology of Husserl and his indirect criticism of existentialist phenomenology. [iii]

1.1. Background to Ricoeur’s Philosophy

In particular, Paul Ricoeur’s thought is indebted to the deep and lasting influence of his teacher particularly Gabriel Marcel and specific thinkers of his own interest such as Edmund Husserl. Also, his early work experience as a teacher of the history of philosophy left a marked influence upon his thinking and appreciation of the whole philosophical tradition. The same can also be said of his exposure to the American educational system and his introduction to the linguistic philosophy and to the analytic method and of the Anglo-American tradition of thought.

1.1.1.1. respect for the mystery of being.

The person who made a significant influence on Ricoeur was his teacher for a long time, Gabriel Marcel. With the latte, Ricoeur holds a profound respect for the mystery of being. This led to Ricoeur’s deep distrust for any simple reductive explanation of the human reality or culture and an appreciation of the complexity of method required to make any enigma comprehensible. However, Ricoeur diverges from Marcel in a number of ways, some of which concerns the latter’s teaching on incarnate existence which the former considered as a premature solution to the philosophical problem of the body, and the Socratic method of teaching of which Ricoeur was dissatisfied because of its inexactness. The methodological weakness rejected by Ricoeur confirms his desire for a rigorous method that was latter provided by the Husserl of Ideen I.

1.1.1.2. Rigor of Phenomenological Method

Husserl is the thinker who caught the interest of Ricoeur and answered the latter’s need for a systematic and rigorous approach lacking in the philosophical diary employed by his long-time teacher. In Husserl’s Ideas, “Ricoeur found the strictness of method that he had earlier sought and from which, he still maintains, any phenomenology going beyond Husserl must begin.”[iv]

1.1.1.3. Rationality as philosophia perennis

Aside from persons, situations also exerted their influence upon Ricoeur. His early work experience as a teacher of the history of Philosophy at the University of Strasbourg correlatively enlarged his existential position. While his being associated with the existentialist philosophy led him to reject any “pure philosophy” as pretentious, his appreciation of the whole philosophical tradition made him recognize that “the inner telos of all philosophy is rationality.” In line with this Ricoeur claims, “if there is a philosophica perennis it is not because of philosophical system has the privileged of intemporality; it is because the concern to understand rationally—even the irrational—is the permanent concern of all philosophy—even the existential.”[v] Hence, the universality of rationality is affirmed not only in the philosophical tradition but in existentialist circles as well.

1.1.1.4. necessity as an aspect of existence

In the middle of the development of the thought of Ricoeur arose another traditional problem posed in relation to and linked to that of freedom—necessity as an aspect of existence. “A plausible reading of Freedom and Nature may thus be made in terms of a friendly critique of existentialist theories of freedom. In its final cycle, Freedom and Nature return to the reciprocity of freedom and necessity.”[vi]

1.1.1.5. analytic and linguistic philosophies of the Anglo-american traditions

1.1.1.6. Narrativity and Temporality

1.1.1.7. Identity

1.2. Reflective Philosophy of a Phenomenological Bent

Ricoeur had committed to make reflective philosophy the overriding concern of his thought. Reflective philosophy joins in the Socratic tradition of seeking to understand oneself in understanding the complex reality of existence through its means of expression. This is implied Ricoeur’s apology of the philosophical use of history: ‘The philosopher has a specific way of fulfilling in himself the historian’s work. This consists in making his own “self-discovery” coincide with a “recovery” of history.’[vii]

1.2.1. Concept of Philosophical Aims as Rational Ontology of human existence

With its correlative concern for the various material expressions of existence, reflective philosophy thus laid the ground for the possible encounter between philosophy and other humanistic disciplines. Here, what is pursued is a rational ontology of human existence. For Ricoeur, this is equivalent to what reflective philosophy sees as the telos of philosophy, that is, a unified or “reconciled” ontology of existence. Unified ontology for Ricoeur is characterized by the equal demands of clarity and depth. These dual requirement of a philosophic thought for a sense of distinctions and a sense for a covert bonds must inform each other.[viii] ‘A clarity without depth is empty so far as it is capable of shedding ultimate light upon the mystery of human existence; but a suggestion of depth without rational clarity is merely “effuse romanticism”.’[ix]

To complement the internal two-fold internal requirements of a philosophic thought is an external demand for reflective philosophy to be directed upon the pre-reflective in its inquiry. Obviously, method is set in tension against the source. For Ricoeur, “… Philosophy seems to be guarded against itself by non-philosophy… it seems that in order to be independent in the elaboration of its problems, methods and statements, philosophy must be dependent with respect to its sources and its profound motivation.”[x] Hence, its source puts limit upon the autonomy of the philosophical enterprise. These double set of tensions find its combined formulation in summary interpretation:

[Philosophic interpretation] is not a question of giving in to some kind of imaginative intuition, but rather of thinking, that is to say, of elaborating concepts that comprehend and make one comprehend concepts woven together, if not in a closed system, at least in a systematic order. But at the same time it is a question of transmitting, by means of this rational elaboration, a richness of signification that was already there, that has preceded rational elaboration.[xi]

This double set of tensions raises the fundamental question of the very possibility of philosophy itself to the extent of the tempting alternative of giving an absolute character to the pre-philosophic for philosophy remains short of the “last word.” Nevertheless, even with this shortcoming of philosophy we must venture to proceed and justify this weak point as a “limit concept”. How this conceptual limit functions is described and elaborated by the myth of the “Last Day”. Ricoeur himself pointed out how the idea of a myth could be converted into a limit idea for philosophy:

From one point of view, the concept of the “Last Day” works as a limiting concept in the Kantian sense, that is as an active limitation of phenomenal history by a total meaning which is “thought” but not known… I am always short of the Last Judgment. By setting up the limit of the Last Day, I hereby step down from my.

1.3. Subjectivity held in Suspect in Transcendental philosophy:

Prominent in the thought of Ricoeur is his rejection of the claim of the self to constitute itself unaided and isolated from the external realities. Otherwise, subjectivity in this manner would be without any genuine philosophical signification. Yet, in the tradition of transcendental philosophy started by Rene Descartes until that of Husserl the subject is invested with confidence to be the ultimate foundation thought. [xii] Consequently, Ricoeur claims, “This ambition is responsible for the great oscillation that causes the “I” of the “I think” to appear, by turns, to be elevated inordinately to the heights of a first truth and then cast down to the depths of vast illusion.”[xiii]

Following Ricoeur, let us focus our analysis on the originator of transcendental thought in order to demonstrate the inadequate constitution of the nature of subjectivity raised to the heights of a complete foundation of thought.

Ricoeur identifies the hyperbolic character of the doubt in Rene Descartes’ Meditations as starting point of the subject’s ambition to be the ultimate foundation of thought. This methodic doubt is of the same scope as the radical nature of the Cartesian project[xiv] ‘which includes within the domain of “opinion” common sense, the sciences—mathematical and physical—and even the philosophical tradition.’[xv] Moreover, more radical doubt might be exercised beyond the scope of the recent type that is all encompassing, proportionate to a similarly extensive deception. Ricoeur notes that Descartes identifies it as “metaphysical doubt.” Ricoeur further elaborates, “In order to dramatize this doubt, Descartes creates the incredible hypothesis of a great deceiver or an evil genius, an inverted image of a truthful God, itself reduced to the status of mere opinion.”[xvi] Thanks to the capability to doubt, the subject is spared from the all-out war waged by the Cartesian project of razing to the ground all materials of deception, of all that seems to be.[xvii]

After the smoke of fire has subsided, what is left then of the subject is but simply the one who says, “I would do well … to deceive myself and pretend for a considerable period that [my thoughts] are wholly false and imaginary.”[xviii] However, Ricoeur would comment that this “I” of doubting is “so uprooted with respect to the spatiotemporal bearings of my body.” It stands for nothing, it is empty. Nonetheless, there remains a value for keeping it. By its insistent and persistent doubt, it testifies to its will to discover certainty and truth. In this regard, Ricoeur echoes Descartes, ‘Through doubt, “I will believe that none of those things… ever existed”: what I want to discover is “one thing that is certain and indubitable.”’[xix] Initially, what has been achieved by the methodic doubt is the certainly of the existence of the subject implied in the hypothesis of the evil genius, that is of the great deceiver. This is also what Ricoeur have in mind when he quotes Descartes, ‘“Then there is no doubt that I exist, if he deceives me. And deceive me as he will, he can never bring it about that I am nothing as long as I shall think that I am something.”’[xx]

Hence, for Descartes, doubt establishes that there is a person who doubts, for in the act of doubting, the existence of the one who doubts is always presupposed. By this we can claim that the subject exists. But this is a solitary subject. The world is divorced from the Cartesian cogito.

An added significance is acquired by our description of the subject, the “who?” when an added concern related to the question “who thinks?” and “who exists?” are grafted to the fundamental question “who doubt?” This concern forced Descartes to pose a new question, that is “knowing what I am.”[xxi] This added concern arises from the utter indetermination of the answer and responds to the need to flesh out the certainty obtained. In fact, the added question for Ricoeur “leads to the more developed expression of the cogito”[xxii] described in two ways as losing its singular determination in becoming thought and tempered by “phenomenologizing” tendency evident in the enumeration preserving the internal variety of the act of thinking. However, the subject that we have here is what Ricoeur describes as a “pointlike ahistorical identity of the “I” in the diversity of its operations.”[xxiii] Ricoeur further claimed that this subject have nothing in common with what he will call as “speaker, agent, character of narration, subject of moral imputation and so forth,” instead it is a “free-floating subjectivity” equivalent to what is called, in a substantialist vocabulary, soul, a subject in its act of thinking. This identity of the subject vanquished all doubts, because it is implicitly asserted in the doubt itself.[xxiv] Thus, Cogito ergo sum is established as the first truth but one that nothing follows says Ricoeur.

That all truth proceeds from the certainty of the cogito is not accepted by all. Ricoeur identifies Martial Gueroult as maintaining reservations on the foundational claim of the cogito. Gueroult maintains, “The certainty of the cogito gives a strictly subjective version of truth; the reign of the evil genius continuous, with regard to whether certainty has any objective value.”[xxv] Following Gueroult, Ricoeur criticizes the cogito as an “internal necessity of science” and proposed instead an appeal to the divine essences, “Although this science is as certain as the Cogito for my understanding, it has certainty only within it, that is for my self enclosed within itself…. only the demonstration of God’s existence will allow me to resolve the question.”[xxvi] Consequently, Ricoeur notes that this demonstration replaces the cogito with divine essences as the first truth.[xxvii] Also, Ricoeur took notice of its effect on the cogito itself which reduced it to a “second ontological rank.” Furthermore, appealing to classical terms he describes the transformative effect of the foundational status of the demonstration of the existence of God as: “if God is the ratio essendi of myself, he thereby becomes the ratio cognoscendi of myself, since I am an imperfect being, a being who is lacking; the imperfection attaching to doubt is known only by the light of the idea of perfection.”[xxviii] The imperfection of the cogito indicates here not only the imperfection of the doubt but also of the unstable nature of certainty achieved by conquering doubt. Nevertheless, as God posits the existence of the self, a firm foundation is set to support the certainty of the cogito which it cannot have by itself. From here follows the idea of the “contemporaneousness of the idea of God and the idea of myself which Ricoeur describes as “the idea of God is in me as the very mark of the creator upon his work, a mark that assures the resemblance between us.”[xxix] But this “fusion” reached a dead end says Ricoeur. Even so, it brings about a new arrangement in the order of reason identified by Ricoeur to be like a loop than of a linear chain in a kind of backward projection from the arrival point to the starting point which is persistently focused on its benefits, that is, “elimination of the insidious hypothesis of a deceitful God that nourishes the most hyperbolic doubt.” For those who would not agree with Descartes, they criticized the circle of reasoning as that of a “gigantic vicious circle.”[xxx]

From this analysis of the Cartesian Cogito, two distinct alternatives are identified by Ricoeur, “either the cogito possesses the value of foundation, but it is a sterile truth which nothing can follow without breaking the order of reason; or it is the idea of perfection that founds it in its condition of finite being, and the first truth loses its aura of first foundation.” [xxxi] Unfortunately, “these alternatives have been transformed into a dilemma by Descartes heir.” One side argues, represented by Spinoza, that the cogito is “no more than an abstract, truncated truth, stripped of any prestige.”[xxxii] While the other side, the entire movement of idealism, maintains that “the only coherent reading of the cogito is that for which the alleged certainty of existence of God is struck with the same seal of subjectivity as the certainty of my own existence.”[xxxiii] In other words, the self here grounds itself. In either of the alternatives Ricoeur mourns over loss of the relation of the self to the “person who speaks, to the I-you of interlocution, to the identity of a historical person, to the self of responsibility.”[xxxiv]

1.4. Shattered Cogito in Nietzsche’s Deconstruction

For Ricoeur, the name, ‘“the shattered cogito” best describe a tradition though not consistently continuous which reached its height in the Nietzsche’s deconstructionist philosophy, thereby making him the “privileged adversary of Descartes.”’ With Nietzsche, the cogito is stripped of its foundational status as the first truth via the critique of language. Ricoeur argued that for Nietzsche “Language is figurative through and through”[xxxv] thus at the same time “deceitful.” Yet, Ricoeur pointed out, despite the double paradox[xxxvi] involved in this argument, Nietzsche “assumed this paradox to the end”. This is something that is missed by Nietzsche’s commentators “who take the apology of Life, of the Will to power, to be the revelation of a new immediacy, substituted in the very place and with the same foundational claim as the cogito.”[xxxvii] While an opposite tendency is more obvious, Nietzsche did have a direction for reconstruction of philosophy; but one that must be subjected to the wave of deconstruction initiated by his tropological reduction. Here, Ricoeur notes, by placing himself under the paradox of the liar, how difficult it is to maintain for Nietzsche a philosophical stance without being overwhelmed by the effect of deconstruction of his philosophy of language. [xxxviii]

Now, self is “cast down to the depths of a vast illusion” wherein there is no chance or meaning of escaping it. However, this is not the case for Nietzsche, for he claims to posses the key to decipher this illusion.[xxxix] Here, the cogito who established itself as the first truth with Descartes has to submit to an overwhelming illusion that is vaster that the doubt created by the hypothesized evil genius. Ricoeur would say in this regards: “In the same way that Descartes’ doubt proceed from the presumed absence of distinction between dreaming and waking, that of Nietzsche proceeds from the ever more hyperbolic absence of distinction between lies and truth.”[xl] Here, Ricoeur further adds somewhat sarcastically, “The evil genius proves to be even more clever than the cogito.” In effect, for Nietzsche’s own philosophy, Ricoeur notes two possibilities: “either it exempts itself from the universal reign of Verstellung (but through what higher ruse could it escape the sophism of the liar?), or else it succumbs to it (but then how can one justify the tone of revelation with which the will to power, the overman, and the eternal return of the same are proclaimed?)”[xli]

In particular, as regards Nietzsche’s crushing critique of the cogito, Ricoeur claims that it is the tropological reduction which provides the accurate key. [xlii] On the one hand, Nietzsche’s critique of the cogito according to Ricoeur commences when the latter asserted the phenomenal character of internal experience which amounts to the claim that “there are no facts, only interpretations”. This critique of internal experience has some devastating consequences upon the integrity of the cogito.[xliii] On the other hand, Nietzsche’s critique ends with “the exercise of a hyperbolic doubt” against the cogito wherein ‘the “I” does not appear as inherent to the cogito but as interpretation of a causal type”. From these Ricoeur outrightly declares what Nietzsche would say plainly: “I doubt better that Descartes.”

1.5. Phenomenology as a favored method in the dialectical recovery of the subject (eidetics of the will, emperics of the will, mythics of the will)

v Husserl’s Structural Phenomenology

v

Paul Ricoeur’s method is characterized by a “general strategy of opposing two sides of a polarity leading to a limit concept.”[xliv] Don Ihde identifies three main features of Ricoeur’s dialectical method.

The first is the use of “weighted focus” which according to Don Ihde, at the lowest level of Ricoeur’s dialectic is “a favored method, against which all opposing or counterfoci are to be played.”

Second, in the second level of Ricoeur’s dialectic methods are opposed. Here, the recognition of the limit of a single focus, indicates for Ricoeur the possibility of a counterfocus.

The third refers to what Ricoeur identifies as a “third term” which evolves from the early stages of the dialectical process so as to bind itself together. Ricoeur claims that the “third term is implied in “very recognition of limits for the counter methods and in the concept of index”; and in Fallible Man, it occupies prominence as “a limit idea.” Don Ihde has these words to say of the third feature of Ricoeur’s dialectical method: The third term, the struggle with a postponed synthesis, and the origin of the problem of hermeneutics are all one and the same problem.”[xlv] Difficult situations are not strange to the thought of Ricoeur, they are even what nurture the development of his thought. For Ihde, these problems “are of lasting import for wider inquiry.”

In the case of phenomenologically based philosophies, its confrontation with “the persistent advance made by objectivist thought” has enabled the former to demonstrate its “philosophical strength”. Philosophical strength refers to the ability of phenomenology “to uncover and expose to thought just those phenomena of experience which tend to be overlooked or discounted by objectivism.”[xlvi] However, on the same strength corresponds a weakness of phenomenology to also overlook a segment of phenomena. In defense of phenomenology, one may argue that it is pre-scientific, that is, the task of phenomenology “remains to remind the sciences that they relate back to the lifeworld whether or not they are aware of it;” but such reductionist view is self-limiting and cannot account for the present success of objectivism.[xlvii]

Moreover, the third feature of the dialectics of Paul Ricoeur indicates a possible “third way”. It arises as Ricoeur teases others to think “that phenomenology itself contains a naïveté in relation to methods which function indirectly (and inspite of their naïveté) and which find their justification precisely in given types of indirectness.”[xlviii] In fact, Ricoeur’s particular brand of phenomenology has to resolve two levels of naïveté in his series of “readings” of the will that has turned itself to be a progressive “demythologi-zation” of two illusions [xlix] which depends on its capacity to be a method that function indirectly and to confront expressions of indirectness. This phenomenology is not seen by Ricoeur as “a return to a prephenomenological objectivism” but rather as “a radicalization of phenomenology itself, an uncovering of the naïveté of transcendentalism itself, a “second Copernican revolution”.[l]

Demythologization in Ricoeur’s phenomenology points to transcendental and objectivist presuppositions.[li] On the one hand, in transcendental thought, phenomenology has to address an illusion ‘which lay open in the “natural attitude,” the possibility for the subject to be “lost” in the world.’ And be treated as one among the things in the world (“a thing of the world”). What Ricoeur hopes to bring out is a subject “now isolated and extricated from being an object among objects, becomes a theme to be investigated for its own sake.”[lii] On the other hand, in an objectivist thought, phenomenology tackles an illusion of the subject gaining full and unaided access to its own conscious thoughts. In Freedom and Nature, Ricoeur describes that this subject “tends to posit itself… the self becomes detached and exiles itself into what the Stoics have already called the circularity of the soul… the circle which I form with myself.”[liii] To the second illusion corresponds naïveté that is more difficult to address than the one equivalent to the first illusion. A possibility that worries Ricoeur here is falling back into the illusion associated with objectivitism, the naïveté of natural attitude. In view of the difficulties associated with the two-fold illusion and naïveté, for Ricoeur phenomenology has to take the route of indirectness, and be that of a hermeneutic kind. We find the incipient stage of this hermeneutic turn of phenomenology in Ricoeur’s Freud and Philosophy where its demands are clarified although it was latent and implied and anticipated at the outset of Ricoeur’s project.[liv] This need for any inquiry into the subject to be indirect in its method is expressed in this quote from Ricoeur’s early work: “The Ego must more radically renounce the covert claim of all consciousness, must abandon its wish to posit itself, so that it can receive the nourishing and inspiring spontaneity which breaks the sterile circle of the self’s constant return to itself.”[lv]

On the phenomenological presupposition of hermeneutics is that “every question concerning any sort of “being” [étant] is a question about the meaning of that “being.” (From Txt to Ac: 38)

Eidetic

v Kantian “phenomenology” to Hegelian developmental phenomenology

v Reflective philosophy as phenomenology

Hermeneutic turn of phenomenology

Clue/key to the direction of Ricoeur’s thought (Hermeneutics Phenemenology)

• Question of hermeneutics (CI:x)
• Use of approximations (CI:xii)
• 3 aspect of the grafting of hermeneutics to phenomenology
• Interpretatioin of symbols (system of symbols)
• Interpretation as hermeneutic philosophy of existence (symbolic existence calls of a work of deciphering
• Hermeneutics of suspicion
• Challenge phenomenology itself it its claim of direct consciousness and control of meaning
• Rejects the claim of the subject to a naïve and direct knowledge of itself instead proposed that the subject has to find itself in the mediation of others
• Dialectics of Phenomenology (Hermeneutics of suspicion challenging Phenomenology): CI: xvii
• Demythologization
• 3 facets of demythologization of faith
• Suspicion and use of the phenomenology
• Dialectic of counterparts: hermeneutics of suspicion and hermeneutics of belief

---

[i] Don Ihde, Hermeneutic Phenomenology, The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, p. p. 3.

[ii] Don Ihde, Hermeneutic Phenomenology, The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971), pp. 3-4.

[iii]Don Ihde, Hermeneutic Phenomenology, The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, pp. 3-8. We will not elaborate on this latter point in this section for this dual criticism of Paul Ricoeur constitutes his whole philosophical enterprise. It will be clarified as we made progress in our discussion.

[iv] Don Ihde, Hermeneutic Phenomenology, p. 9.

[v] Paul Ricoeur, “Le Renouvellement de problème de la philosophie chrétiene par les philosophies de l’existence,” Le Problème de la philosophie chrétiene (Paris: P.U.P., 1949), p. 55. Cited in Dohn Ihde, Hermeneutic Phenomenology, p. 10.

[vi] Don Ihde, Hermeneutic Phenomenology, pp. 10-11.

[vii] Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1965), p. 32. Cited in Don Ihde, Hermeneutic Phenomenology, p. 11.

[viii] Paul Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1966), p. 15. Cited in Don Ihde, Hermeneutic Phenomenology, p. 11-12.

[ix] Don Ihde, Hermeneutic Phenomenology, p. 12.

[x] Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth, p. 14. Cited in Don Ihde, Hermeneutic Phenomenology, p. 12.

[xi] Paul Ricouer, The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection,” trans. by Dennis Savage, International Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 2 no. 2 (May 1962), p. 200. Don Ihde, Hermeneutic Phenomenology, p. 12.

[xii] “If this ambition of establishing an ultimate foundation has seen itself radicalized from Descartes to Kant, then from Kant to Fichte, and finally to the Husserl of Cartesian Meditations, it nevertheless seems to me that it is enough to focus on its birthplace, in Descartes himself, whose philosophy confirms that the crisis of the cogito is contemporaneous with the positing of the cogito.” Paul Ricouer, Oneself as Another, translated by Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 5.

[xiii] Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, pp.4-5..

[xiv] To describe the radical nature of the Cartesian project, Ricoeur quotes Descartes, “I realized that for once I had to raze everything in my life down to the very bottom, so as to begin again from the first foundation, if I wanted to establish anything firm and lasting in the sciences.” René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. By Donald E. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1979), p. 14. Cited in Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 5.

[xv] Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 5

[xvi] Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 5. An instance of what Ricoeur calls “hyperbolic doubt” is a quote “How do I know that I am not deceived each time I add two and three.” René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, p. 14. Cited in Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, note no. 5.

[xvii] “Descartes is here saying that a person must not be misled by the judgments accorded to him by his sense faculties. And since the senses deceive, the real criterion for truth should be that which is indubitable. In other words, doubt stand out as a method leading towards certainty.” Christopher Ryan B. Maboloc, “Paul Ricoeur’s Phenomenology of the Will” in http://ryanphilosophy.blogspot.com/2005/03/paul-ricoeurs-phenomenology-of-will.html accessed on May 31, 2007.

[xviii] René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, p. 16. Cited in Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 5.

[xix] René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, p. 17. Cited in Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 6. What has been achieved in the “First Mediation” was the positing of the “I” in the doubting. The reversal of doubt into the certainty of the Cogito happens in the “Second Mediation”.

[xx] René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, p. 17. Cited in Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 6.

[xxi] Concerning this question of the “what” of “who doubts”? Ricoeur includes the following note: ‘”But I do not yet understand well enough who I am__I who now necessarily exist;” “I know that I exist; I ask now who is this “I” whom I know” (Ibid., p. 19 … ) This shift from the question “who?” to the question “what?” is prepared by a use of the verb “to b,” which oscillates between the absolute “I am, I exist,” and the predicative “I am something.” Something, but what?’ Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, note no. 10.

[xxii] Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 7. Regarding this claim, Ricoeur quotes Descartes, ‘“I am therefore precisely because only a thing that thinks; that is a mind, or soul, or intellect, or reason—words the meaning of which I was ignorant before.”’ René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, p. 19; cited in Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 7. Ricoeur further adds that the question “what?” bring us into “a predicative investigation”, “what pertains to this understanding that I have of myself” or simply “its nature” Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 7.

[xxiii] Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 7. Ricoeur further describes this as follows: “this identity is that of the same that escapes the alternatives of permanence and change in time, since the cogito is instantaneous.” Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 7

[xxiv] Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, pp. 7-8.

[xxv] Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 8.

[xxvi] Martial Gueroult, Descartes Philosophy Interpreted according to the Order of Reasons, vol. I, The Soul and God, trans. Roger Ariew (Minneapolis-University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 52, 84; cited in Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 8.

[xxvii] Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 8. Here Ricoeur argues for the subordination of the cogito in relation to divine veracity which involves neither circularity nor sophism which he claims to rest on the distinction between two ways of characterizing ideas. Cf. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, note no. 14.

[xxviii] Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 9.

[xxix] Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 9. Contemporaneousness is present in the words of Descartes quoted by Ricoeur to demonstrate the idea: “‘just the idea of myself, [the idea of God] was born and produced with me when I was created”; I perceive this likeness… by the same faculty through which I perceive myself.”’ René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, p. 33; cited in Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 9.

[xxx] Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 10. It’s interesting to note that Ricoeur did not elaborate on this critical comment on Descartes.

[xxxi] Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 10.

[xxxii] Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 10. Ricoeur also identifies Melabranche to share the same position as Spinoza. Although Ricoeur held that the latter was the most consistent by citing the latter’s arguments in Ethics. Cf. Baruch Spinoza, The Ethics, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1982); cited in Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, note no. 15.

[xxxiii] Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 10. Ricoeur traces the entire movement of idealism “through Kant, Fichte and Husserl. Faced with the challenged of a subjectivist idealism their proposal was to divest the “I think” of any psychological resonance or of any autobiographical reference. Instead, it must be the Kantian “I think” that must accompany all our acts. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 11.

[xxxiv] Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 11.

[xxxv] Ricoeur traces the root of this claim by Nietzsche in the latter’s work, Course on Rhetoric where “the novel idea that tropes—metaphors, synecdoche, metonomy [sic] —do not constitute ornaments added onto a discourse that is by right literal and nonfigurative but instead are inherent in the most basic linguistic functioning.” Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p.12.

[xxxvi] The first paradox, “life, apparently taken in a referential and nonfigural sense, is taken as the source of the fables by which it sustains itself.” And the second, “Nietzsche’s discourse on truth as a lie ought to be drawn into the abyss of the paradox of the liar.” Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p.12.

[xxxvii] Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p.12.

[xxxviii] Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p.12.

[xxxix] An important help in decoding illusion is to be familiar with the “functioning of illusion as vertellung.” Part of this process is the sense of displacement signifying dissimulation.

[xl] Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p.13.

[xli] Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p.13. Ricoeur adds, “This dilemma, which does not seem to have kept Nietzsche from writing, has become that of his commentators, split in two camps: the faithful and the ironists.”

[xlii] Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p.14. In the same paragraph, Ricoeur speaks of the direction of his evaluation of Nietzsche’s deconstruction which is “to show in Nietzsche’s anticogito not the inverse of the Cartesian cogito but the very destruction of the very question to which the cogito was held to give an absolute answer.” What is referred to here concerns desire to come up with a stable foundation of truth which the cogito is tasked to provide. Thus with Nietzsche, with the ground for its worth shred into pieces, the cogito is humbled if not divested of its foundational claim.

[xliii] The critique of the internal experience is detrimental to the cogito in the following ways: (1) “Nietzsche destroys the exceptional character of the cogito with respect to the doubt that Descartes directed to the distinction between the world of dreams and the world of waking.” (2) as it aligns “the connection of inner experience with external “causation” which is also an illusion that conceals the play of forces under the artifice of order.” (3) as it posits “an entirely arbitrary unity, that fiction called “thinking”, apart from the bristling multiplicity of instincts.” (4) as it imagines ‘a “substratum of subject” in which the acts of thought would have their origin.” Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p.14

[xliv] Don Ihde, Hermeneutic Phenomenology, The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, p. 14

[xlv] Don Ihde, Hermeneutic Phenomenology, The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, p. 16. This amount to the thesis of Don Ihde indicated by the title of his work..Here cite some hypothesis constructed by Ihde..

[xlvi] Don Ihde, Hermeneutic Phenomenology, The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, p. 17. It must be remembered that phenomenology gives primacy to concrete experiences in its investigations of the structures of consciousness. Cf. “Phenomenology”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy in http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology accessed on June 6, 2007.

[xlvii] Don Ihde, Hermeneutic Phenomenology, The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, p. 17-18.

[xlviii] Don Ihde, Hermeneutic Phenomenology, The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, p. 18.

[xlix] Ihde speaks of ‘“demythologization” of two illusions which correspond to transcendental and objectivist presuppositions.’ Don Ihde, Hermeneutic Phenomenology, The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, p. 18. This analysis of the early development of the thought of Ricoeur, anticipates his latter concern and further refinement of the need to resolve the challenge posed against the self’s absolute immediacy. In this paper, I have extensively discussed Ricoeur’s evaluation of the subject in relation to the two dominant philosophical traditions under the heading Subjectivity in Transcendental Philosophy and Shattered Cogito in Nietzsche’ deconstruction. See..pp above. In what follows, Ricoeur’s particular version of phenomenology will address some excesses connected with these two extremist views on the Subject.

[l] Don Ihde, Hermeneutic Phenomenology, The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, p. 17. Kant’s theory of synthetic a priori knowledge is referred to here as the original Copernican revolution in epistemology wherein the prior dominant view of “knowledge conforming to objects” was replaced by that revolutionary Kantian insight that “objects conform to knowledge.” Now Ricoeur is proposing a second Copernican revolution with his particular brand of phenomenology. This is expressed in this quote from Ricoeur’s studies on Husserl: ‘The constitutive character of consciousness is a conquest of criticism over naturalistic (or mundane) naïveté. But the transcendental level thus won conceals a second-level naïveté—the naïveté of criticism which consists in considering the “transcendental,” the “constitutive” as absolutely irreducible… it is as if a second naïveté were involved in it, a transcendental naïveté which takes the place of the naturalistic one. The transcendental reflection creates the illusion that philosophy could be a reflection without a spiritual discipline (ascèse), without a purification of its own seeing.’ Paul Ricoeur, Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology, trans. Edward G. Ballard and Lester E. Embree (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1967)p. 228, 232.

[li] Demythologization being related to the hermeneutics of suspicion “is a process of of interpretation which accepts the loss of all pretensions to direct rationality in symbolic discourse, but at the same time this loss is seen as the way toward a freeing, a recovery, of the symbolic existential dimension.” Don Ihde, ed. “Editor’s Introduction, “ in Paul Ricoeur, Conflict of Interpretations, Essays in Hermeneutics (Northwestern University Press, 1974), pp. xvii-xviii.

[lii]Cf. Paul Ricoeur, Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology,p. 20; cited in of Don Ihde, Hermeneutic Phenomenology, The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, p. 19.

[liii] Paul Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature: the Voluntary and Involuntary, trans. Erazin Kohak (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1966), p. 14; cited in Don Ihde, Hermeneutic Phenomenology, The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, p. 19.

[liv] Don Ihde, Hermeneutic Phenomenology, The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, p. 19.

[lv] Paul Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature: the Voluntary and Involuntary, p. 14; cited in Don Ihde, Hermeneutic Phenomenology, The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, p. 19-20.