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Living Well With and for Others in Just Institutions (Ricoeur 1994:330)

09/06/2011 By Kelly Cooper

"It is finally on the ethical plane that the affection of the self by the other displays the specific features that belong as much to the properly ethical plane as to the moral plane of obligation. The very definition of ethics that we have proposed—living well with and for others in just institutions—cannot be conceived without the project of living well being affected by solicitude, both that which is exerted and that which is received. Prior to any consideration of the justice of the exchanges, the dialectic of self-esteem and friendship can be entirely rewritten in terms of a dialectic of action and affection. In order to be the 'friend of oneself'—in accordance with Aristotelian philautia—one must already have entered into a relation of friendship with others as though friendship for oneself were a self-affection rigorously correlative to the affection by and for the other as friend. In this sense, friendship forms the bed of justice, as the virtue 'for others,' following another of Aristotle's sayings. The passage from ethics to morality—from the operative mode of living well to the imperative mode of obligation—occurred, in the study that followed, under the protection of the Golden Rule, to which we thought we gave full credit by assigning it to the merit of interposing the commandment at the very intersection of the asymmetrical relation between doing and undergoing (the good you would want to be done to you, the evil you would hate to be done to you). Acting and suffering then seem to be distributed between two different protagonists: the agent and the patient, the latter appearing as the potential victim of the former. But because of the reversibility of the roles, each agent is the patient of the other. Inasmuch as one is affected by the power over one exerted by the other, the agent is invested with the responsibility of an action that is placed from the very outset under the rule of reciprocity, which the rule of justice will transform into a rule of equality. Since each protagonist holds two roles, being both agent and patient, the formalism of the categorical imperative requires the 'matter' of a plurality of acting beings each affected by forces exerted reciprocally.

The question here is that of determining what new figure of otherness is called for by this affection of the ipse by the other than self and, by implication, what dialectic of the Same and the Other replies to the demand for a phenomenology of the self affected by the other than self" (Ricoeur 1994:330-331).

Ricoeur, Paul
1994[1990] Oneself as Another. Kathleen Blamey, trans. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

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“Who?” (Ricoeur 1996:447).

01/03/2011 By Kelly Cooper

“The problematic of the self, which I present in Oneself as Another, unfolds on several levels of the connotations of the verb ‘to act.’ On a first level, that of a hermeneutic phenomenology, my investigation was guided by a network of questions close to ordinary language: who is the subject of discourse? Who is the subject of the act? Who is the subject of a narrative? Who is the subject of moral imputation? A certain dispersion of the inquiry was assured by the relative autonomy of the phenomenological fields traversed: those of language, action, narrative, and responsibility. But the reiteration of the question ‘Who?’ compensates for this dispersion through the insistence of one encompassing question that authorizes taking the assertion of the self to be the correlative answer to the question ‘Who?’ We are asking about the self insofar as we undertake to answer a question that asks ‘Who?’ or ‘Why?’ This is why, step by step in Oneself as Another, I submitted to a phenomenological investigation the categories of the utterance and the speaker, then those of the ability to act and the agent, then those of narration and the narrator, and finally that of the imputation of acts and that of a subject who can be held accountable for its acts. The properly hermeneutic tenor of this first-order investigation was assured by the dialectic of understanding and explanation that, at each one of the four steps, gives an occasion for a confrontation between phenomenological and analytic philosophy that allows us to dissociate the reflective turn toward the self from the alleged immediacy of older philosophies of the ego.

The ‘meta’ function is not be arbitrarily superimposed on this inquiry. It finds its initial expression in the function of bringing together assigned as much to the question ‘Who?’ as to the answer: soi–myself, yourself, himself, herself, ourselves, themselves. Therefore to the very correlation between the ‘Who?’ of the question and the ‘self’ of the answer.

The ‘meta’ function finds a second expression in the operation of bringing together at a higher degree assigned to the encompassing category of action. In different though related senses, to speak, do, recount, submit to imputation, can be taken as distinct models of a more fundamental ‘acting.’ But this latter is given nowhere other than in speech acts, in practical initiatives and interventions, in the emplotment of recounted actions and of the protagonists of these actions, or in the act of imputing to someone responsibility for the speaking, doing, or recounting. This is why I will risk speaking of acting, as a common feature of these multiple phenomenological expressions under the sign of the analogy of acting. I am well aware of the pitfalls into which any recourse to analogy may fall, as happen with the scholastic interpretations of the pros hen on the plane of the sequence of categories. But I am not claiming any pros hen for my series of categories of acting. From analogy I am only retaining the place held between homonymy and univocity by what Wittgenstein called family resemblance.

To speak, do, recount, impute are, by turns, the first analogon of the series of figures of acting, as a function of what Kant would have called an interest of reason that is different in each case. Speaking is the first analogon inasmuch as it is within a symbolic, hence verbal, setting that all other modalities of acting get determined. The philosophy of action is, in its analytic phase, a semantics of action sentences, and, in its reflective phase, an investigation of ways of speaking of oneself as an agent, ways of recognizing oneself verbally as the author of one’s own acts; narration is speaking par excellence, discourse and text; and moral imputation is spoken through the features of a special kind of attribution, an ‘ascription’ joining imputed action to the responsible agent” (Ricoeur 1996:447-448).

Ricoeur, Paul. (1996). From metaphysics to moral philosophy. Philosophy Today, 40(4), 443-458. Retrieved March 1, 2011, from ProQuest Religion. (Document ID: 10926125).

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Concordant Discordance

01/02/2011 By Kelly Cooper

“From this correlation between action and character in a narrative there results a dialectic internal to the character which is the exact corollary of the dialectic of concordance and discordance developed by the emplotment of action. The dialectic consists in the fact that, following the line of concordance, the character draws his or her singularity from the unity of a life considered a temporal totality which is itself singular and distinguished from all others. Following the line of discordance, this temporal totality is threatened by the disruptive effect of the unforseeable events that punctuate it (encounters, accidents, etc.). Because of the concordant discordant synthesis, the contingency of the event contributes to the necessity, retroactive so to speak, of the history of a life, to which is equated the identify of the character. Thus chance is transmuted into fate. And the identity of the character emploted, so to speak, can be understood only in terms of this dialectic. The thesis of identity which Parfit calls nonreductionist receives more than an assist from this dialectic, something more like a complete overhaul. The person , understood as a character in a story, is not an entity distinct from his or her ‘experiences.’ Quite the opposite: the person shares the condition of dynamic identity peculiar to the story recounted. The narrative constructs the identity of the character, what can be called his or her narrative identity, in constructing that of the story told. It is the identity of the story that makes the identity of the character.

This dialectic of discordant concordance belonging to the character must now be inscribed within the dialectic of sameness and of selfhood. The necessity of this reinscription imposes itself as soon as the discordant concordance of the character is confronted with the search for permanence in time attached to the notion of identity, a confrontation that brings out the equivocalness we made apparent in the preceding study: on one side, we said, there is the sameness of character; on the other, the ipseity, or selfhood, of self-constancy. We have now to show how the dialectic of the character comes to be inscribed in the interval between these two poles of permanence in time in order to mediate between them.

This mediating function performed by the narrative identity of the character between the poles of sameness and selfhood is attested to primarily by the imaginative variations to which the narrative submits this identity. In truth, the narrative does not merely tolerate these variations, it engenders them, seeks them out. In this sense, literature proves to consist in a vast laboratory for thought experiments in which the resources of variation encompassed by narrative identity are put to the test of narration. The benefit of these thought experiments lies in the fact that they make the difference between the two meanings of permanence in time evident, by varying the relation between then. In every day experience, as we have said, these meanings tend to overlap and to merge with one another; in this way, counting on someone is both relying on the stability of character and expecting that the other will keep his or her word, regardless of the changes that may affect the lasting dispositions by which that person is recognized” (Ricoeur 1994:147-148).

Ricoeur, Paul
1994[1990] Oneself as Another. Kathleen Blamey, trans. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press

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A Dialectic of the Self

17/01/2011 By Kelly Cooper

“It is finally on the ethical plane that the affection of the self by the other displays the specific features that belong as much to the properly ethical plane as to the moral plane of obligation. The very definition of ethics that we have proposed-living well with and for others in just institutions-cannot be conceived without the project of living well being affected by solicitude, both that which is exerted and that which is received. Prior to any consideration of the justice of the exchanges, the dialectic of self-esteem and friendship can be entirely rewritten in terms of a dialectic of action and affection. In order to be the ‘friend of oneself’-in accordance with Aristotelian philautia-one must already have entered into a relation of friendship with others, as though friendship for oneself were a self-affection rigorously correlative to the affection by and for the other as friend. In this sense, friendship forms the bed of justice, as the virtue ‘for others,’ following another of Aristotle’s sayings. The passage from ethics to morality-from the optative mode of living well to the imperative mode of obligation-occurred… under the protection of the Golden Rule, to which we thought we gave full credit by assigning it to the merit of interposing the commandment at the very intersection of the asymmetrical relation between doing and undergoing (the good you would want to be done to you, the evil you would hate to be done to you). Acting and suffering then seem to be distributed between two different protagonists: the agent and the patient, the latter appearing as the potential victim by the other. Inasmuch as one is affected by the power over one exerted by the other, the agent is invested with the responsibility of an action that is placed from the very outset under the rule of reciprocity, which the rule of justice will transform into a rule of equality. Since each protagonist holds two roles, being both agent and patient, the formalism of the categorical imperative requires the ‘matter’ of a plurality of acting beings each affected by forces exerted reciprocally.

The question here is that of determining what new figure of otherness is called for by this affection of the ipse by the other than self and, by implication, what dialected of the Same and the Other replies to the demand for a phenomenology of the self affected by the other than self.

I should like to show essentially that it is impossible to construct this dialectic in a unilateral manner, whether one attempts, with Husserl, to derive the alter ego from the ego or whether, with Lévinas, one reserves for the Other the exclusive initiative for assigning responsibility to the self. A two-pronged conception of otherness remains to be constructed here, one that does justice in turn to the primary of self-esteem and also to the primacy of the convocation to justice coming from the other. What is at stake here… is a formulation of otherness that is homogeneous with the fundamental distinction between two ideas of the Same-the Same as idem and the Same as ipse-a distinction upon which our entire philosophy of selfhood (ipseity) has been based” (Ricoeur 1994:330-331).

Ricoeur, Paul
1994[1990] Oneself as Another. Kathleen Blamey, trans. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

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