You are here: Home / Archives for symbolism
post

Defilement: The Most Archaic Experience of All

14/02/2011 By Kelly Cooper

“For the present, we can at least say that the concept of the servile will, to which the most differentiated, the most subtle, the most internalized experience draws near, was already aimed at by the most archaic experience of all, that of defilement. The final symbol indicates its limiting concept only by taking up into itself all the wealth of the prior symbols. Thus, there is a circular relation among all the symbols: the last bring out the meaning of the preceding ones, but the first lend to the last all their power of symbolization.

It is possible to show this by going through the whole series of symbols in the opposite direction. It is remarkable, indeed, that guilt turns to its own account of the symbolic language in which the experiences of defilement and sin took shape.

Guilt cannot, in fact express itself except in the indirect language of ‘captivity’ and ‘infection,’ inherited from the two prior stages. Thus both symbols are transposed ‘inward’ to express a freedom that enslaves itself, affects itself, and infects itself by its own choice. Conversely, the symbolic and non-literal character of the captivity of sin and the infection of defilement becomes quite clear when these symbols are used to denote a dimension of freedom itself; then and only then do we know that they are symbols, when they reveal a situation that is centered in the relation of oneself to oneself. Why this recourse to the prior symbolism? Because the paradox of a captive free will-the paradox of a servile will-that is unsupportable for thought. That freedom must be delivered and that this deliverance is deliverance from self-enslavement cannot be said directly; yet it is the central theme of ‘salvation.’

The symbol of captivity, borrowed, as we know, from the theology of history, first designated a communal situation, that of a people made prisoner by its sins. This communal situation is still attached to the historical event that is re-enacted in the liturgy, as the unhappy fate from which the Exodus delivered them. In becoming a symbol of the guilty individual, the notion of captivity is detached from the memory of the historical event and gets the quality of a pure symbol; it designates an event in freedom” (Ricoeur 1969:152-153).

Ricoeur, Paul
1969[1967] The Symbolism of Evil. Emerson Buchanan, trans. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Citation Style AAA

Filed Under: Will Tagged With: , , , , ,
post

Saying is Showing

15/01/2011 By Kelly Cooper

“…if there is some sense in speaking of a hermeneutics of the sacred, it lies in the degree to which the double meaning of a text which, for example, in telling me about the Exodus, opens onto a certain state of wandering which is lived existentially as a movement from captivity to deliverance. Under the summons of a word which gives what it ordains, the double meaning aims here at deciphering an existential movement, a certain ontological condition of man, by means of the surplus of meaning attached to the event which, in its literalness, is situated in the observable historical world. Here, double meaning is the means of detecting a condition of being.

In this way, symbolism, taken at the level of manifestation in texts, marks the breakthrough of language toward something other than itself-what I call its opening. This breakthrough is saying; and saying is showing. This is the strength and the weakness of hermeneutics; its weakness because, taking language at the moment when it escapes from its enclosure, it takes it at the moment when it also escapes a scientific treatment, which can begin only by postulating the closed system of the signifying universe. All other weaknesses flow from this one, and first and foremost the conspicuous weakness of delivering hermeneutics over to the warfare of rival philosophical projects. But this weakness is also its strength, because the place where language escapes from itself and escapes us is also the place where language comes to itself, the place where language is saying. Whether I understand the relation of showing-hiding as a psychoanalyst or as a phenomenologist of religion (and I think that today these two possibilities must be assumed together), the understanding is in each case like a force which discovers, which manifests which brings to light, a force which language utilizes and becomes itself. Then language becomes silent before what it says.

I will venture to summarize this in a few words: the sole philosophical interest in symbolism is that it reveals, by its structure of double meaning, the equivocalness of being: ‘Being speaks in many ways.’ Symbolism’s raison d’être is to open the multiplicity of meaning to the unequivocalness of being” (Ricoeur 1974:66-67).

Ricoeur, Paul
1974[1969] The Conflict of Interpretations. Don Ihde, ed. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Citation Style AAA

Filed Under: Symbolism Tagged With: , , ,