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
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
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.
[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 (
[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 (
[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.
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