Ricoeur as Another

Stephanie.Geary

Description

This collection of essays by internationally known Paul Ricoeur experts explores the noted philosopher's book, Oneself as Another. Ricoeur's book represents the completion of a decades-long inquiry into the self as he links his earlier studies of symbolism, hermeneutics, phenomenology, the philosophy of language, action theory, and theory of narrative to his most recent concern for ethics and the social constitution of ethical subjectivity.

Cohen and Marsh's volume is divided into two parts, the first primarily involving Ricoeur's thought itself, and the second involving the relation of his thought to that of others, such as Levinas, Rawls, Habermas, Apel, Taylor, and MacIntyre. The contributors also offer detailed examinations of Ricoeur's ethical theory and its ontological implications.

Introduction by James L. Marsh

Sigla

Part One. Ricoeur in Himself

1. Personal Identity
Charles E. Reagan

2. The Doubleness of Subjectivity: Regenerating the Phenomenology of Intentionality
Lenore Langsdorf

3. Rethinking Subjectivity: Narrative Identity and the Self
David Rasmussen

4. Can There Be a Science of Action?
John van den Hengel

5. Literary and Science Fictions: Philosophers and Technomyths
Don Ihde

Part Two. Ricoeur in Relation to Others

6. Ricoeur and Levinas: Solicitude in Reciprocity and Solitude in Existence
Patrick L. Bourgeois

7. Moral Selfhood: A Levinasian Response to Ricoeur on Levinas
Richard A. Cohen

8. Between Conviction and Critique: Reflexive Philosophy, Testimony, and Pneumatology
Eric Crump

9. At the Limit of Practical Wisdom: Moral Blindness
David Pellauer

10. Response to Rawls
Bernard P. Dauenhauer

11. The Right and the Good: A Solution to the Communicative Ethics Controversy
James L. Marsh

About the Contributors

Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Éthique et morale
• Ethique et morale

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 24 janvier 2002
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780791489444
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 10 Mo

Extrait

ricoeur as another the ethics of subjectivity richard a. cohen and james l. marsh, editors

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R I C O E U R A S A N O T H E R

SUNY series in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences

Lenore Langsdorf, editor

R I C O E U R A S A N O T H E R

T h e E t h i c s o f S u b j e c t i v i t y

Edited by Richard A. Cohen James L. Marsh

State University of New York Press

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

© 2002 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

For information, address State University of New York Press, 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany, NY 12207

Production by Judith Block Marketing by Anne Valentine

Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data

Ricoeur as another : the ethics of subjectivity / edited by Richard A. Cohen, James L. Marsh. p. cm. — (SUNY series in the philosophy of the social sciences) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7914-5189-5 (alk. paper)—ISBN 0-7914-5190-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Ricoeur, Paul. 2. Ethics. 3. Subjectivity. I. Cohen, Richard A. II. Marsh, James L. III. Series.

B2430.R554 R53 2002 194—dc21

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

2001031188

C o n t e n t s

Introduction by James L. Marsh Sigla

PART ONE. RICOEUR IN HIMSELF 1. Personal Identity Charles E. Reagan

2. The Doubleness of Subjectivity: Regenerating the Phenomenology of Intentionality Lenore Langsdorf

3. Rethinking Subjectivity: Narrative Identity and the Self David Rasmussen

4. Can There Be a Science of Action? John van den Hengel

5. Literary and Science Fictions: Philosophers and Technomyths Don Ihde

PART TWO. RICOEUR IN RELATION TO OTHERS 6. Ricoeur and Levinas: Solicitude in Reciprocity and Solitude in Existence Patrick L. Bourgeois

7. Moral Selfhood: A Levinasian Response to Ricoeur on Levinas Richard A. Cohen

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CONTENTS

8. Between Conviction and Critique: Reflexive Philosophy, Testimony, and Pneumatology Eric Crump

9. At the Limit of Practical Wisdom: Moral Blindness David Pellauer

10. Response to Rawls Bernard P. Dauenhauer

11. The Right and the Good: A Solution to the Communicative Ethics Controversy James L. Marsh

About the Contributors

Index

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I n t r o d u c t i o n

After an initial reading of Ricoeur’sOneself as Another,we have the impres- sion of a very significant work. One may or may not go all the way with Charles Reagan, one of the contributors to this volume, when he says that this is “Ricoeur’s most elegantly written, clearly organized, and closely argued work” (2), or, later in his essay, that the book is “the very model of his philosophical style” (33). But we do have a sense nonetheless that the work brings to a tentative conclusion, always open to further development, a series of different but related inquiries carried out over the course of a lifetime into the self, freedom, interpretation, narrative, and critique. One relatively new aspect of the work is that the last four chapters rep- resent Ricoeur’s first fully systematic and sustained statement of his ethics and its ontological implications. Ethics is not a fully new concern of Ricoeur’s, but his reflections in the past have been more momentary and episodic and most often in the context of pursuing something else. This relatively new ethical aspect of his work is related to other kinds of inquiry that have been typical Ricoeurian themes, such as action theory, the semantics and pragmat- ics of language, and narrative theory. All of the themes in this new book, however, are unified by the theme of the self as another and as related to the other. One of Ricoeur’s early works,Freedom and Nature, was a sustained phe- nomenological inquiry into the nature and limits of freedom. We are left at the end of that work, however, with a question about the ethical implica- tions of his inquiry into freedom.Oneself as Anothercan be taken as his most mature answer to that question. Much, of course, intervenes in the time betweenFreedom and Natureand Oneself as Another. Soon after writing that first book, Ricoeur inSymbolism of Evilto take his famous hermeneutical turn, moving from direct begins phenomenological description of human experience to interpretation of that

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INTRODUCTION

experience. I read such a turn to interpretation as complementing rather than replacing direct description, which Ricoeur continues to employ through the rest of his career. Such a turn continues in subsequent works such as Freud and Philosophy, The Conflict of Interpretations, The Life of Metaphor, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning,andTime and Narrative. At the same time, Ricoeur is broadening his inquiry into analytic theories of action, exploring the implications for politics inIdeology and Utopia,and intervening in the Habermas-Gadamer debate over the relative merits of hermeneutics and critical theory. In one sense, then,Oneself as Anotherrepresents a concentrated taking up and linking of previous themes in philosophy of language, action theory, and theory of narrative with the relatively new theme of ethics. In another sense the work represents the completion of a decades-long inquiry into the self in its phenomenologically accessible, linguistic, hermeneutical, and ethical as- pects. LikeFreedom and Nature in the career of early Ricoeur andInterpre- tation Theoryin his early hermeneutical phase andTime and Narrativein the later hermeneutical phase of his work,Oneself as Another represents a very tightly constructed, argued synthesis of earlier, more disparate inquiries into the self, language, action, narrative, and ethics. One senses here in this work, as in Ricoeur’s other work, a dialectical interplay between particular and universal, analytic and synthetic, experien- tial and interpretative, hermeneutical and explanatory, disparate and syn- thetic lines of inquiry.Freedom and Natureto synthetic completion brings earlier universal, eidetic phenomenological inquiries into Husserl, Jaspers, Marcel, and other related thinkers and themes in phenomenology and exis- tentialism. At the same time, that work opens onto more concrete reflections on existential freedom inFallible Man and evil inSymbolism of Evil. The reflective inquiry into the hermeneutics of the symbol inSymbolism of Evil opens onto a series of inquiries finally completed in the much more universal and syntheticInterpretation Theoryin the middle 1970s. Themes presented from phenomenology, analytic action theory, philosophy of language, theory of metaphor, and literary theory are integrated in the magisterialTime and Narrative. Again, as already stated, themes from philosophy of language, action theory, hermeneutics, and ethics are integrated into one whole in Oneself as Another. Ricoeur’s book, then, represents a tentative completion of earlier inquiries into the free, embodied self going back to his very earliest work. What kind of ethics is implied by his account of the free, embodied, social self, which is in the world and mediated by structures of language and by a psychological and social unconscious? The book at the same time represents a synthetic