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,
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,
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.
[1] Mark Muldoon,
[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 FĂLLESDAL, “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.
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