Levinas and Ricoeur: two modalities of self

Part 2 (Ricoeur)

Francesco Amati

NOTES

Delivered on the 9th May 2004
Continental Philosophy Group

As we saw in my last paper, Ricoeur began his foray into selfhood by rejecting the Cartesian concept of subjectivity, which he calls the posited cogito. This I is elevated to a first truth and a principle from where all certainty can be attained. This foundational positing of the I has no mediation, but is immediately available to us. On the other hand, he also rejects the more recent tradition (which we can roughly identify as the post-modern condition), begun by Nietzsche in which the I of the I think is an effect of a rhetorical interplay and therefore, of a linguistic mediation. This tradition Ricoeur dubs the shattered cogito. We also saw that Levinas attempted to recover subjectivity by placing the self outside thematisation and hence outside the realm of ontology. In Levinas too it was not a posited I. It is a modality not of being but of the ex-ceptional, exemplified in responsibility, substitution and proximity. The self is a radical passivity, which is evoked by the face of the other who demands an ethical response. A demand such as thou shalt not kill turns accusatory and can only elicit a response it’s me here, a response that in fact makes us hostage to the other. The other therefore, moves towards me, but I can only have a kind of sensuous proximity to the other, and the self in its totality (in the realm of the same, and beyond any phenomenology and hermeneutics), will always ensure that there is a complete break between itself and otherness.  Otherness cannot have any determination of being and cannot even be conceptualised.  The self is in a world of its own, which can only wait for the summoning of the other, but in its passivity can never initiate the ethical moment. In Levinas, sociality is prior to the ethical, and we shall see that it is the reverse in Ricoeur.

For his part, Ricoeur argues that such a self not only remains solipsistic, but also can never be taken in the sense of the self-designation of a subject of discourse, action, narrative, or ethical commitment. (OA335) The separation between the self and the other in Levinas, is more radical than either Fichtean or Hüsserlian self-grounding. It is a radicalism that wills total closure on the part of the self and an otherness that is absolute exteriority. This exteriority cannot be represented, because for Levinas representation is assimilation to oneself and it would thus taint the absolute exteriority of otherness. As Ricoeur explains When the face of the other raises itself before me, above me, it is not an appearance that I can include within the sphere of my own representations…the face is not a spectacle; it is a voice. (OA336)  Such an uncompromising view of subjectivity on the part of Levinas, not only does not allow the self to initiate action according to Ricoeur, but it rejects any kind of dialectical movement between the great metacategories of Same and Other. This strikes Ricoeur as inadequate because the Same signifies totalisation and separation, the exteriority of the Other can no longer be expressed in the language of relation. (OA336) How can we possibly proceed to think of the self, given the conditions of an irrelation?   Ricoeur then argues that Levinas is engaging in hyperbole when rejecting the possibility of thematisation, and when arguing that thematisation must be accompanied, at the same time, with the retraction of this thematisation. According to Levinas philosophy is this constant doing and undoing. Remember that Levinas equates the Said with theme and representation, which can never capture the true nature of the encounter between the self and the other. The Said must always be retracted by a movement that closely resembles, but is not the same as skepticism, in order that the self remain a response to the other. The self must be totally separated from the other. Ricoeur comments paradoxically, it is the hyperbole of separation, on the side of the Same, that appears to me to lead the hyperbole of exteriority, on the side of the other, to an impasse, unless the preeminently ethical movement of the other toward the self is made to intersect with the gnoseological movement from the self toward the other, (OA339) and he adds that the formation of a concept of selfhood defined by its openness and its capacity for discovery would be impossible.

A second objection that Ricoeur makes of Levinas is that for the self to respond to the call of the other, it must contain within it a reflexive structure simply to have a capacity of reception to start with. This capacity of reception cannot be entirely passive, if the other is to influence me and an opening created; then Ricoeur argues, to mediate the opening of the Same onto the Other and the internalisation of the voice of the Other in the Same, must not language contribute its resources of communication, hence of reciprocity? (OA339) Levinas had explained that the only possibility of this opening of the self to the other is through a substitution that is beyond communication and is reduced to a testimony, the self is the very fact of being exposed under the accusation that cannot be asssumed, where the ego supports the others, unlike the certainty of the ego that rejoins itself in freedom. (OB118) Ricoeur seizes upon this idea of testimony as an auto-exhibition of the self, to drive home the point that a dialogue must firstly be established before any testimony is possible. The dialogue must also reflect the movement from the Same toward the Other as well as the Other toward the Same. These two are mutually inclusive and it allows us to complement Levinas’ accusative of It’s me here with the equally pertinent nominative of Here I stand.

After this brief, incomplete and simplistic analysis of Ricoeur’s critique of Levinas, we will investigate how Ricoeur views selfhood. It is immediately obvious from what we have been saying that Ricoeur desires to retrieve the idea of an agency as a productive activity, which can interfere with and influence the events of the world. As in Levinas, Ricoeur’s self is always an ethical self, however, it is not a self that awaits the command of the other. It can initiate action a la Aristotle. Hence Ricoeur affirms albeit in a non-solipsistic way, Hüsserl’s intentionality, and redefines it as ethical intentionality, which he explains as aiming at the ‘good life’ with and for others, in just institutions. (OA172)

However, Ricoeur rejects the notion that the self can be known through an act of present self-consciousness. His claim is that the self as a process, as a productive activity, can only be known reflexively through a series of mediations. These mediations involve an application of hermeneutics on the self’s activities as events in the world, which can be termed objectifications. Observing the self by way of objectifications, Ricoeur calls his approach a detour. This detour in Ricoeur’s book Oneself as Another, consists of a series of ten studies, and proceeds in three steps, which are three major phenomenological intentions. (OA1-3). Lenore Langsdorf explains these three steps very succinctly, 1 “the primacy of reflective mediation over the immediate positing of the subject,” 2 sameness in contrast to selfhood, and 3 the dialectical relationship between selfhood and the other-than self that is not sameness. The tenth study explores a possible ontological status for selfhood, which Ricoeur calls a second order discourse, and which is superimposed on his hermeneutical method. Therefore, there are four manners of questioning: Who is speaking? Who is acting? Who is recounting about himself or herself? Who is the moral subject of imputation? These studies come under the title Toward a Hermeneutics of the Self, and are subdivided into subsets, which we shall now examine. 
1.	the primacy of reflective mediation over the immediate positing of the subject.

Ricoeur begins his detour by endorsing mediation in the form of a philosophy of language and a philosophy of action, which studies 1 to 4 cover, and which can be more or less divided into semantics and pragmatics. He draws from analytical philosophy where it has in some ways, cross-fertilised with continental philosophy. Ricoeur argues that language provides us with an identifying reference: language contains specific connecting units that allow us to designate individuals. (OA27) What languages have in common albeit stressing that there are areas of difference, is the process or operation of individualisation, which can take the form of definite descriptors e.g. the first man in space; proper names e.g. Noël; or indicators such as you, here etc.  According to Ricoeur individualisation is the inverse of classification with the result that in language we observe a particularising process. In sum, definite descriptors consist in creating a class that has but a single member, proper names are limited to singularising an unrepeatable, indivisible entity, while indicators individualise with reference to the speaker. “Here” means in the proximity of the speaker, in relation to which “there” makes sense. “Now” refers to events contemporaneous with the speaking itself. At this point, none of these individualising operations privileges the person.  Ricoeur then proceeds to discuss Strawson’s basic particulars, and Austin and Searle’s speech acts to point out that not only is it in the nature of language to refer to an entity, but also that speech itself is an event in the world, which can be regarded as action. Language does not just describe (constatives), it performs (performatives), it is itself a doing, such as promising, giving a verdict, proclaiming, naming. The point of Ricoeur’s investigation here is to seize on the referential character of speech acts, which perform, and which are actions in themselves. The performatives are indications that the question can arise, Of whom does one speak in designating persons, as distinct from things, in the referential mode? (OA7) Semantics therefore, is inextricably bound up with pragmatics. Semantics, Ricoeur argues, is a referential approach, whereas pragmatics is a reflexive approach. As a referential approach, semantics speaks in terms of the third person, but pragmatics in dealing with action, speaks in terms of the first person, the I addressing a you. However, Ricoeur believes that the two must overlap, the question will be finally to determine how the “I-you of interlocution can be externalised in a “him” or “her” without losing its capacity to designate itself, and how the “he/she” of identifying reference can be internalised in a speaking subject who designates himself or herself as an I. (OA41) Interlocution is an operative word, because earlier on, Ricoeur had stated that pragmatics is a theory of language whose utterances must be investigated in specific contexts of interlocution. Ricoeur is not seeking to undertake an empirical inquiry, but rather to pursue a transcendental viewpoint generating an investigation into the conditions that govern language use. (OA40)
 
Ricoeur comes to the I by arguing that utterances are not isolated facts, but an illocutionary force, which brings the I to expression, and also implies that a speaker has a listener. Therefore, a reciprocal relationship is established. Thus interlocution is revealed to be an exchange of intentionalities, reciprocally aimed at one another. (OA44) Nevertheless, Ricoeur to a certain extent finds all this inadequate. An utterance can be attributed to an I, but this indicator is defective in indicating a self. Both pragmatics and semantics are limited in this respect. It is part of a typology, which betrays an act, but not the actor, there is no need for any explicit mention of the author of discourse. (OA47) So far no who can be reflected, there is only a suggestion that some entity is being spoken about, that is only the factuality of an utterance and its speaker. Pragmatics exposes us to the problem of identification.

Ricoeur believes that there is a prejudice in analytic philosophy, which resonates in post-modern thought. All utterances have been regarded as events. Events considered as objects in the world, frame any linguistic investigation around the question what?, rather than the question who?. If Ricoeur is right, the philosophical tradition has interpreted the activity of speaking as an event in the world among other events, and therefore, has the some status as cause and effect, which makes any investigation lean toward the question why? The category of what? and why? as a category of cause and event have been preferred over the category of who? as a category of motive and action. The upshot is that the process of intentionality so central to the definition of agency has been interpreted in the manner of physical bodies. In other words, a category mistake has been made. This has led to another prejudice, the preference of a knowing-that over a knowing-how. I don’t want to dwell on this point in Ricoeur’s Oneself as Another, suffice to say that the tendency of analytical philosophy a la Davidson, effaces agency as the power to act in favour of impersonal utterance as an event equal to a thing or a substance, which requires a causal antecedent. Motivation on the other hand can be applied to the self’s potential to act, and is far more complex than cause. Ricoeur argues that such an analysis as exemplified in analytical philosophy, acknowledges a kind of intention-with-which rather than an intention-to, which has allowed the attenuation…of the temporal dimension of anticipation, which accompanies the agent’s projecting himself ahead of himself. Intention-with-which favours past actions, or descriptions of completed actions with no regard for the actions that project into the future. However, according to Ricoeur, we must take into account the value of analytic philosophy and its investigation into language in having offered us a semantic of action, which assumes the role of a  propaedeutic to the question of selfhood, and which also provides us with the criteria of objectification. However, it fails to account for the temporal aspect of agency and its correlative of power-to-act, which are both needed to arrive at the identity of a moral self. Ricoeur believes that once a theory of action has been accepted, we can proceed toward the phenomenological and hermeneutical tradition to complement the work of semantics and pragmatics.

2. 	Sameness in contrast to Selfhood

Though semantics can provide an identifying reference, the examination of speech-acts does not consider that agency has a history, that there is a temporal dimension to the self, and that agency can change. So in the fifth and sixth studies Ricoeur proposes a theory of narrative, which helps us in understanding how the self is constituted. This is going to proceed along the line of a dialectic between sameness and selfhood. Narrative theory expands on the limitations of the semantics and pragmatics of action, and links us to the broader question of the relationship between the self and ethics. Narrative in the form of fiction for example, provides us with a vast laboratory of ethical experiments, which consists of estimations, evaluations, and judgments of approval and condemnation. Ricoeur also believes that it is in narrative that the dialectic between sameness and selfhood can lead us to personal identity. How can we say that a self is the same, and at the same time undergo changes? In other words, what does permanence in time mean when it comes to selfhood?  Ricoeur suggests there are two kinds of sameness: one consisting of quantitative and qualitative identity, which can be repeated and reidentified as exact similitude.  This he calls idem identity, from the Latin meaning the same thing. On the other hand, there is a weak similitude, which allows the notion of a changing identity as uninterrupted continuity in time. Ricoeur calls this kind of sameness an ipse identity, which is from the Latin demonstrative pronoun meaning oneself.  These two kinds of identities overlap in narrative identity to suggest a self that is constant, but dynamic and changing in time. Therefore, there is no need to resort to a determining substratum. If self means temporality, then it is a process not a substance.

The self possesses idem-identity in that it has developed sedimented actions in its history, which we call human character. By character Ricoeur is thinking of the set of distinctive marks which permit the reidentification of a human individual as being the same. By the descriptive features that will be given, the individual compounds numerical and qualitative identity, uninterrupted continuity and permanence in time. In this way, the sameness of the person is designated emblematically. (OA119) Furthermore, character is given the perception of immutability by acquiring certain dispositions, and these dispositions turn into lasting dispositions by which we can recognise the same person.   Van Den Hengel explains, here, the self displays a consistency, a constancy. As such, the self appears to possess a substantive identity, which endures as something that can be identified again and again as being the same. 

Returning to the idea of performatives in the theory of language, Ricoeur argues that given the nature of time and the narrative framework, the self by promising and committing for the future, assures us that when a self remains truthful to his/her promises, innovation is possible since it is determined by anticipated actions. This is ipse-identity, which produces the dialectic between sedimentation and innovation. Again Van Den Hengel explains, in these projected actions, the identity is not substantive but in the process of becoming…it becomes other without losing personal identity. (RO84)
Narrative thus provides a combination of discordance and concordance, which defies Locke’s irreconcilable opposites of identity and diversity. Ricoeur further argues that narrative identity as it unfolds as plot and as a manifold of events in a temporal unity, is a synthesis of the heterogeneous. (OA141) The role exhibited by a character revolves around past occurrences and anticipations, which betray the fact that a self is both agent and victim in the sense of passivity. Otherness intrudes into our identity and is part of this identity right from the start. Ricoeur states, for my part, I never forget to speak of humans as acting and suffering. (OA144) In other words what has happened or is happening to us is as important as what we actively do. However, as we saw, unlike Levinas, Ricoeur does not believe that we are purely passive in our responsibility. The point about narrative configuration is that it is a mediation, which provides a context to human action, and consequently, highlights the constitutive rules and relations of practices. Unlike analytic philosophy, we are moving away from description and referential identity to a state of self-reference within practices, there is a twofold movement of ascending complexification starting from basic actions and from practices, and of descending specification starting from the vague and mobile horizon of ideals and projects in light of which a human life apprehends itself in its oneness. (OA158) This mediation with its complications of both past and anticipated events draws us closer to the unfolding of an ethical self. When this kind of context is added to narrative identity, the process of the self cannot be other than ethical. Ricoeur seems to think that performatives like promising, which project and open up into the future, create an ethical notion of self-constancy, self-constancy is for each person that manner of conducting himself or herself so that others can count on that person. Because someone is counting on me, I am accountable for my actions before another. The term “responsibility” unites both meanings: “counting on” and “being accountable for.” It unites them, adding to them the idea of a response to the question “Where are you?” asked by another who needs me. This response is the following: “Here I am!” a response that is a statement of self-constancy. This puts us beyond any semiotic interplay of deconstruction. Performatives such as keeping to one’s word provide an opening into the future, and thus exhaust the resources of language games by going beyond them, while pointing toward an agency, which initiates actions through a series of ethical choices.

3 	The dialectical relationship between selfhood and the other-than self that is not sameness.

Through the mediation of narrative, Ricoeur claims that one’s actions and one’s life can be seen as a text to which the hermeneutical circle can be applied, for the agent, interpreting the text of an action is interpreting himself or herself. (OA179) The self can be spotted indirectly through an endless process of interpretation. The context of narrative forces us to ask the questions Who is speaking? Who is acting? Who is telling his or her story? Who is the moral subject of imputation? But the ethical dimension to selfhood always implies another who is formative. Hence we are born into an ethical environment where constructive rules are already present for us. We are now in studies 7-9. Since we are dealing with others, Ricoeur believes we can track the self in two movements: an ethical movement where we consider what is good; and a second moral one where we observe what imposes itself as obligatory. The first movement aims at an accomplished life or in Aristotelian terms the good life, and which is therefore, teleological; whereas the moral movement that is characterised by norms claiming to be universal is deontological. Because of this framework within which the teleological has priority over the deontological, practical wisdom prevails over universal norms wherever there is an impasse, though it must be stressed that practical wisdom does not dispense with norms, in fact it will need them. Practical wisdom is yet another mediation through which we can impute agency, given that someone must put this wisdom into practice. Practices also require evaluations on the kind of life led, and it is these evaluations, which enable us to appreciate ourselves as authors of actions.  These evaluations is how we arrive at self-esteem, our concept of the self is greatly enriched by this relation between interpretation of the text of action and self-interpretation. On the ethical plane, self-interpretation becomes self-esteem. In return, self-esteem follows the fate of interpretation. Like the latter, it provokes controversy, dispute, rivalry – in short the conflict of interpretations – in the exercise of practical judgments. (OA179)   However, self-esteem is a kind of solitary virtue. Ricoeur uses the Aristotelian concept of mutuality as mediation, represented best in the activity of friendship, to bridge the gap between self-esteem and the capacity to act. In the exchange of giving and receiving, the self establishes a relationship that aims at the other, which Ricoeur calls solicitude. Friendship that works on the basis of some kind of equality, places us in a state of exchange, the agents and patients of an action are caught up in relationships of exchange which, like language, join together the reversibility of roles and nonsubstitutability of persons. Solicitude adds the dimension of value, whereby each person is irreplaceable in our affection and our esteem. (OA193) 

Whereas friendship deals with equality and reciprocity, justice operates within institutions. Ricoeur is interested in the interpersonal relationship in institutions rather than their structures, because institutions are yet another form of mediation through which we can detect the process of subjectivity. Ricoeur sees in institutions the existence of the otherness of individuals opposed to the unitary aspect of the concept of humanity. (RA25) Therefore, a conflict can occur between contextualism and universalism, and it is here that practical wisdom in the form of ethics can moderate the deontology of an institution. We do not necessarily accept certain norms in an institution, and can argue by way of a practical solution against those norms. But on their part, institutions are relations of otherness in which we have to deal with other people. Therefore, the norms of deontology in their claim to universality, in their turn, moderate practical wisdom, by providing us with a framework that makes us respect the other, and analogously self-respect for ourselves. Hence it is in a specific institutional milieu that the capacities and predispositions that distinguish human action can blossom; the individual becomes human only under the condition of certain institutions; if this is so, the obligation to serve these institutions is itself a condition for the human agent to develop. (OA254) 

The three steps, which we have covered, description, narration and prescription, are not supposed to be a development of subjectivity. Ricoeur informs us that they can be taken individually, or in any order. They are in a manner of speaking fragments, but the three of them are also kinds of mediations through which subjectivity is reflected. Each one reflects subjectivity in its own way, and we are to think in terms of an analogical unity, which points to the productivity of selfhood. Ricoeur regards his hermeneutic as providing this analogical unity, and as aspiring to a certainty that is not the scientific certainty of the cogito philosophies, but an alethic (veritative) one, which he calls attestation. Attestation is needed as a counter to the epistemic claims to certainty. It is not the doxic belief of ‘I believe-that’, but belongs to the grammar of ‘I believe-in’. It thus links up with testimony…in as much as it is in the speech of the one giving testimony that one believes. (OA21) It is in attestation that one’s self-constancy is proven. Unlike knowledge however, it possesses a special fragility. Attestation, Ricoeur continues, in the form of credence, also transcends the philosophies of suspicion as exemplified by Nietzsche, which still see things through the eyes of truth and untruth. Attestation is attestation whether true or false. I quote at length from Ricoeur: Attestation is fundamentally attestation of ‘self’. This trust will, in turn, be a trust in the power to say, in the power to do, in the power to recognise as a character in a narrative, in the power, finally, to respond to accusation in the form of the accusative: ‘it’s me here’, to borrow a expression dear to Levinas. At this stage, attestation will be that of what is commonly called conscience and which in German is termed ‘Gewissen’. And if one admits that the problematic of acting constitutes the analogical unity within which all of these investigations are grouped, attestation can be defined as the ‘assurance of being oneself acting and suffering. This assurance becomes the ultimate recourse against all suspicion; even if it is always in some sense received from another, it still remains self-attestation. It is self-attestation that, at every level – linguistic, praxic, narrative, and prescriptive – will preserve the question ‘who?’ from being replaced by the questions ‘what?’ or ‘why?’ Conversely, at the centre of the aporia, only the persistence of the question ‘who?’ – in a way laid bare for lack of a response – will reveal itself to be impregnable refuge of attestation.(OA23)

Ricoeur’s book Oneself as Another consists of the Gifford Lectures, which he delivered in 1986 at the university of Edinburgh. Later on in 1988 he added a tenth study, which is an ontological investigation into the question of self, and which Ricoeur claims further reinforces the analogical unity of selfhood. This tenth study requires a separate presentation.