Ok, now that it seems conclusive that the deontological, individualist formalism in the Kantian tradition, which relies heavily on fictive formulation of the original contract, can be thrown out of the window. But hold on a second, as moderate and eclectic as Ricoeur is, he is never about fully rejecting anything. To him, the merit of his narrative approach derives from the patient long detour it takes. In the third study, this is first contrasted with Kantian formalismâs hasty universalization, and then put in conversation with Habermasian communicative ethics. He made a pretty helpful distinction between regressive justification and progressive actualization. The former requires morality to be constantly justified by ethical intuition, whereas the latter continuously moves morality forwards for its fulfillment. Recall the threefold relationship between ethics and morality at the beginning of the third study: 1). the primacy of ethics over morality; 2). the necessity to test ethics through the sieve of norms; and 3). the necessity to return to ethics as practical wisdom. We have arrived at the third step, through which the inevitable conflicts between universal moral norms and concrete situations. This conflict was explored in the second step, which further justifies the first step (primacy). The question is, now what? He summarizes it as âpractical wisdomâ that
âhas no recourse,âŠâŠ, other than to return to the initial intuition of ethics, in the framework of moral judgment in situation, that is, to the vision or aim of the âgood lifeâ with and for others in just institutions.â (240)
Note that this is neither about inventing a third agent for judgment nor about disavowing moral maxims once and for all, but a balanced dialectical relation between moral obligations and convictions. But what exactly does he mean by âconvictionâ and/or âethical intuitionâ?
He wrote this chapter amidst his son Oliverâs fatal suicide. The Interlude, âTragic Actionâ, is an attempt to cope with the personal pain by being honest about the limitations embedded in moral prescription. It is this limitation, one which creates contradictions in every corner of human moral life, that Ricoeurâs narrative self seeks to confront instead of avoiding. It is here that you get a glimpse of what he means by âfictionâ: a compulsive avoidance of contradiction in contractualist moral theories. A self-deceptive cover-up of conflicts in human social life, both subjective and intersubjective ones, toward various forms of solipsism. Here, he resorts to the otherworldly realm to describe the indescribable that âintrudesâ into the sovereign design of narrative coherency. Spiritual powers, archaic and mythical energies, divinities of the underworld, mysterious depth of motivation, Catharsis, ritual, all of which are terms he uses to point to the âfinality of the tragic spectacleâ that âinfinitely exceeds every directly didactic intention.â (242) We can indeed read this as a continuation of the core theme in Time and Narrative volume one, the dialectic between discordance and concordance. Again he directs us to the ultimate limitation of the human, all too human, character of every institution. (245)
With this emphasis on the non-philosophical dimension that tragedy dwells, we venture closer and closer to a post-humanist Ricoeur, one which is willing enough to reject the illusion of and attachment to humanism. But not quite, as in other discourses of tragedy in political theory (Nussbaumâs and Scottâs, to name a few). He proceeds through the aspirational notion of poesis, deinon, one of ambiguity that oscillates between admirability and monstrosity. It is clear here that his is an essentially pre-humanist vision with a post-humanist ambition and an anti-humanist potential. This in-betweenness of the tragic allows him to land at the teachings of âthink correctlyâ and âdeliberate wellâ. (247) It is an important point thatâs worth quoting at length,
âTaken as such, tragedy produces an ethicopractical aporia that is added onto those that have appeared throughout our quest for selfhood; it repeats, in particular, the aporias of narrative identity that were identified in the preceding study. In this respect, one of the functions of tragedy in relation to ethics is to create a gap between tragic wisdom and practical wisdom. By refusing to contribute a âsolutionâ to the conflicts made insoluble by fiction, tragedy, after having disoriented the gaze, condemns the person of praxis to reorient action, at his or her own risk, in the sense of a practical wisdom in situation that best responds to tragic wisdom. This response, deferred by the festive contemplation of the spectacle, make conviction the haven beyond catharsisâ
The conflict, as an inevitable product of the encounter between the irreducible singularity of the character and the one-sidedness of the moral principle, can be a productive one insofar as it transform the tragic to the practical. Such reorientation only takes place in actions, sheltering âmoral conviction from the ruinous alternatives of univocity or arbitrarinessâ, that is, from the tragic monsters. (249)
Tragic Drama After the Subject
It is clear here that an emplotment is at work without the authorâs explicit acknowledgement. The failure of moral principles, the death of the Subject, the inevitable clash between the universal and the local. Life is too complex to plan around and it is this complexity that conditions universalism to its ruinous tendency. Wonderful, Ricoeur, why insist on the universal as a mediator of the tragic though? We soon realize heâs talking about the grammar of the modern Subject, the myth of universal individualism, the paradox of its contradiction with concrete individuals. He is talking about the fact that modern culture is a culture of death, which reminds me of Klee Benallyâs quote of John Trudell in No Spiritual Surrender,
âThis thing called technologic civilization wants every human beingâit tries to break the spirit so the mind will surrender. We arenât put here for that. Everything that happens in our life is a series of experiences. If we understand that, maybe we can truly learn something from those experiences. What I do know is that I come from a culture that is deeply rooted in the whole idea and reality of the continuation of life. And Iâm dealing with another culture whose perception is a reality of death.â (27)
Lamenting this exact same perceived reality of death, Ricoeur strives to denaturalize the ruins by charting out a regressive route and demanding progressive history to happen slower. Tragedy is thus a friction of history, something that can and should be managed and minimized but not eliminated. The messages are clear. First, life without modernity is unimaginable, as the tragic signals a deadlock for thinking a way out of the Subjectâs inevitable confrontation with conflicts and the destruction these conflict entail. Second, reform modernity, so that it could prioritize life rather than death by reorienting its responses to the ethics-morality conflicts. We are once again reminded of his core concern throughout the book: expanding the narrative capacity of the self in favor of ethical, intersubjective relationship building. This is where conflicts appear problematic, albeit inevitable, as they represent the violence of moral principle in seeking to actualize itself at a large scale.
Conflict One: Senses of Justice vs. The Spirit of A People
This regressive justificatory route first takes us to reexamine Rawlsian formalism, particularly its procedural understanding of justice as fairness. To Ricoeur, this conceals the deep conflicts, given the fact of diversity in human society, between different visions of what qualifies a good as good. What Rawls offers is thereby at best a considered guess and teleological in nature. Even when political theorists, such as Michael Walzer, try to diversify the list of goods to match with the complex reality, problems continue to arise insofar as such lists can never exhaust concrete possibilities and options emerge in real politics. Given Ricoeurâs primary ethical concern, the problem of arbitrariness cannot be resolved by given a third entity, such as the state, the sole authority to exercise arbitration. By tracing the Hegelian tradition of abstract right that regulates the triangular relationship between a will, a thing, and another will, Ricoeur points out the fundamental weakness of it: its juridical atomism renders the discussion of concrete, connected persons impossible. And this is why the contractualists are condemned to hold only a fictive account of the contract, as thereâs no feasible way to actualize such contract and put it in place in real life. He thus posits civil society as the dialectical anthesis to organic bonds, interpreting Hegelâs Sittlichkeit (ethical life or ethical order) as
ââŠâŠon the one hand, in the sense of the system of collective agencies of mediation interpolated between the abstract idea of freedom and its realization as âsecond natureâ and, on the other, as the gradual triumph of the organic bond between men and women over the exteriority of the juridical relation (an exteriority aggravated by that of the economic relation)âŠâŠ.â (255)
Therefore, there is no solid grounding for obeying the Hegelian state constitution, endowed with self-knowledge, insofar as we turn Hegel upside down. Here, Ricoeur implicitly reminds us of the fact that he is indeed a socialist-Marxist, particularly one that aims at demythifying the liberal fascist state. Here is a beautiful paragraph of Ricoeurâs anti-fascist manifesto:
âWhat, finally, is inadmissible in Hegel is the thesis of the objective mind and its corollary, the thesis of the state erected as a superior agency endowed with self-knowledge. Most impressive, certainly, is the requisitory that Hegel addresses against moral consciousness when it sets itself as a supreme tribunal in superb ignorance of the Sittlichkeit in which the spirit of a people is embodied. For us, who have crossed through the monstrous events of the twentieth century tied to the phenomenon of totalitarianism, we have reasons to listen to the opposite verdict, devastating in another way, pronounced by history itself through the mouths of its victims. When the spirit of a people is perverted to the point of feeding a deadly Sittlichkeit, it is finally in the moral consciousness of a small number of individuals, inaccessible to fear and to corruption, that the spirit takes refuge, once it has fled the now-criminal institutions. Who would still dare to chide the beautiful soul, when it alone remains to bear witness against the hero of action? To be sure, the painful conflict between moral consciousness and the spirit of a people is not always so disastrous, but it always stands as a reminder and a warning. It attests in a paroxysmic manner to the unsurpassable tragedy of action, to which Hegel himself did justice in his fine pages on Antigone.â
Ironically, what does it mean to be a conflict-avoidant Marxist? Sociologists nowadays categorize Marxism as conflict theory, which says a lot about the anti-communist traces of social sciences in the United States amidst its ongoing Cold War with imaginary enemies. We see transference happening at the textual level here as Ricoeur moves from critiquing the normative foundation of political theory to the catastrophization of the stateâs monopolization of power. Totalitarianism as the tyranny of the collective constituted by inorganic civic society, as a theoretical framework, amounts to a post-trauma magnification of fear of the liberal state, despite its analytical efficacy. By using the emplotment of tragedy, Ricoeur interprets it as an inevitable historical aporia and seals the possibility of anti-totalitarianism. The job is to continuously renarrativize the self toward the ethical to tame the tragic, not to launch yet another political project but to engage in some sort of harm reduction work.
His critiques target the mythification of the Hegelian liberal state, that is, the myth that separate the political from the ethical, not the liberal state per se. It is this mythification that allows Hannah Arendt to distinguish power (and thus the political) from domination. But Ricoeur notes the arbitrariness of such separation by unpacking the political paradox at work, in which âform and force continue to confront one another within the same agencyâŠâŠforce and form are conjoined in the legitimate use of violenceâ. (257) We can take a glimpse of his agonistic democratic idea in his definition of *the political â*as the sets of organized practices relating to the distribution of political power, better termed domination.â (257) With this he marks three spheres where political conflicts occur: 1). deliberative democracy (with rules of the game largely agreed upon); 2). political philosophy (where the ends of âgoodâ governments are debated); and 3). democratic legitimation (via which the desire to live together is called into question).
With this he returns to the senses of justice, for which equity is another name. Drawing from Aristotle he notes that equity should take primacy as it remedies the rule of justice âwhere the legislator fails us and has erred by over-simplicityâ. (262)
Conflict Two: Respect for the Person vs. Respect for the Rule
Ricoeur returns to the discussion of the Kantian maxim against false promise, this time taking a second path of concretization/application in the strong sense. Again, the problem with Kant is that his argument does not allow others to actually be taken into consideration. Instead, it is solely tested by universalization and internal coherence at the detriment of otherness. The only exception made, throughout his works on false promise, is when such action is justified and necessitated by self-love. Ricoeur counteracts this by submitting the moral rule to another set of test: âthat of circumstances and consequencesâ. (265) Through this second path one can start asking whether and how the genuine otherness of persons can make ways for exceptions. He points to the plural structure of promises, which engage the actor, the receiver, the witness, the language subtext, and more, that resembles that plurality of the political discussed above. For the sake of the discussion here, he limits it to the dialogic-dyadic (involving two persons) structure of promising, or self-constancy. He notes,
âThe obligation to maintain oneâs self in keeping oneâs promises is in danger of solidifying into the Stoic rigidity of simple constancy, if it is not permeated by the desire to respond to an exception, even to a request coming from another.â (267)
This simple constancy locks the self in her hermetically sealed individuality, one that has to be broken open to be able to establish the principle of reciprocity. Thus, Ricoeur proposes the idea of âavailabilityâ, a radical openness to the dialogic-dyadic structure and solicitude that are erased by the field of legal norms. Availability entails the capacity to improvise conducts âthat will best satisfy the exception required by solicitude, by betraying the rule to the smallest extent possibleâ. (269) This is particularly relevant in cases where the rule creates suffering, and practical wisdom is called for to mediate between such suffering, on the one hand, and happiness, on the other hand. Harm reduction again comes to my mind when reading these lines, where sufferings are exceptions, not the rule per se. He is navigating the ambiguity between the majority cases of goodness of the rule and its minor opposite of ruins. This proportionality judgment also guides his latter comments on the ontological division between human and things in these moral rules. Again, thereâs an ambiguity between the majority cases of clarity of what a human is and its minor opposite of in-betweenness (he uses the example of an embryo to demonstrate the idea of a potential humanity). Practical wisdom, as he shows in these example, is not universalizable though not arbitrary, and it takes plural voices of the most competent and the wisest to reach. (273) He concludes this second conflict at the interpersonal level,
ââŠâŠone can say that it is to solicitude, concerned with the otherness of persons, including "potential persons," that respect refers, in those cases where it is itself the source of conflicts, in particular in novel situations produced by the powers that technology gives humans over the phenomena of life. But this is not the somewhat "naive" solicitude of the seventh study but a "critical" solicitude that has passed through the double test of the moral conditions of respect and the conflicts generated by the latter. This critical solicitude is the form that practical wisdom takes in the region of interpersonal relations.â (273)
Conflict Three: Contextualism and Universalism
This is the part where I am almost convinced that Ricoeur is on the same page with da Silva. After the long detour, we finally arrive at where we started: autonomy. In this last step, Ricoeur embark on a journey of completely revising Kantian formalism, not to refute it, but to allow the full mediation of the confrontation between the universalist claim and the historically-contextualized and communitarian ones. To do this he asks three questions. First, why give autonomy the priority? This method of reading backward exposes the arbitrariness of autonomy as a foundation for Kantian maxim, as thereâs no solid âcomplete determinationâ without the backward testing. (274) Kant continues the aporia of selfhood that appeared in the preceding studies, which is Ricoeurâs way of naming the transparency thesisâ assumed homogeneous interiority and self-evidence of selfhood. To Ricoeur, âDependency as âexternalityâ, related to the dialogic condition of autonomy, in a sense takes over from dependency as âinteriorityâ revealed by these three aporiasâ (of reason, respect, and will). (275) The teachings and offerings of otherness is completely erased in Kant.
Second, why is autonomy the metacriterion for universalization? Kant reduces the universalization to noncontradiction, which appears to be extremely restrictive and limited when applied to concrete historical locations. Ricoeur moves on to compare Kantian moral coherence (pre-supposed, hierarchical, mutually non-exclusive, not vacuity) and legal coherence (case-based, inventive and constructive alongside the emergence of new cases). He offers a sharp comment that,
ââŠâŠbesides the procedures of constructive interpretation similar to legal reasoning, moral philosophy has to incorporate a sharp critique of prejudices and ideological residues in its enterprise of reconstructing the specificatory premises capable of assuring the fragile coherence of the moral system. It is here that rationalism unexpectedly crosses paths with tragic wisdom: is it not true that the narrowing affecting the vision of "spiritual greatness" that the two protagonists of Sophocles' Antigone are held to serve has as its equivalent, on the plane of moral theory, a perverse use of the "specificatory premises" that have to be unmasked by a critique of ideologies?â (280)
Third, what keep the autonomous self and the law in sync? This is a further investigation of the Kantian legacy through the works of Karl-Otto Apel and Jurgen Habermas, which contains the paradox of concealing conflicts emerges in situation through devising sets of communicative ethics. To begin with, Apel makes an important intervention to Kantian transcendentalism by reconstructing the test of universalization through the idea of âperformative contradictionâ. Autonomy, or the self-legislative character of freedom, is thus protected from the critique above, of its easy disruption by imperfect coherence. Ricoeur summarizes that:
âTranscendental pragmatics repeats, in the practical field, the Kantian transcendental deduction by showing how the principle of universalization, acting as a rule of argumentation, is implicit in the presuppositions of argumentation in general. The presupposition of an "unlimited community of communication" has no role other than to state, on the level of presuppositions, the perfect congruence between the autonomy of judgment of each person and the expectation of consensus of all the persons involved in practical discourse.â (282)
Following Habermasâ critique, he notes, âThe recourse to performative contradiction, for Habermas, denotes nothing more than an admission that there exists no principle of replacement within the framework of argumentative practice, without this transcendental presupposition standing as a final justification.â (283)
The Habermasian Solution to The Conflicts, Reformulated
Habermas refutes transcendental pragmatics as it provides insufficient justification for argumentative practices. First, on the plane of just institution, the reason the communicative ethicist wants to offer such justifications is the unsatisfactory, procedural theory of justice that liberalism presents. As Ricoeur marks, âevery distribution, in the broad sense that we have attributed to this word, appears problematic: in fact, there is no system of distribution that is universally valid; all known systems express revocable, chance choices, bound up with the struggles that mark the violent history of societies.â (284) It does necessitate a contentious process in establishing just institutions, and to Habermas, such process is argumentative. Second, when it comes to interpersonal relations, the conflict between universal humanism (of ârational beingsâ) and concrete situations, generates debates about what it is to be respected that mediating between the respect of rule and respect of persons. Thirdly, the conflict between the universalization of autonomy and the violences it generates requires a cautious look into its route of application. With the three conflicts above, Ricoeur thus sets the stage for Habermasian ethics of communication or argumentation. Note that by critiquing the universalism of Habermas, he is by no means endorsing contextualism wholeheartedly, because to him, thereâs no contextualism if thereâs no universalism. They are the two sides of the same coin. What he suggests is to recover the bridges between contextualism and universalism, against their false division and dichotomization.
In Habermas, it is the familiar Kantian impulse of purification that leads to such division. âConventionâ to Habermas is what âinclinationâ is to Kant. To Ricoeur, this has to do with the specific interpretation of modernity exclusively as a definite break with a past of tradition and authority, where norms are not to be publicly debated. Critiquing the antagonism between argumentation and convention, he reformulates communicative ethics as a subtle dialectic between argumentation and conviction, which âhas no theoretical outcome but only the practical outcome of the arbitration of moral judgment in situation.â (287) Except for the fact that it carries the requirement of universalization, argumentation is like any other language games. This means that it is operative
ââŠâŠonly if it assumes the mediation of other language games that participate in the formation of options that are the stakes of the debate. The intended goal is then to extract from the positions in confrontation the best arguments that can be offered to the protagonists in the discussion. But the corrective action of the ethics of argumentation presupposes that the discussion is about something, about the âthings of lifeââŠâŠ.argumentation is not simply posited as the antagonist of tradition and conviction, but as the critical agency operating at the heart of convictions, argumentation assuming the task not of eliminating but carrying them to the level of âconsidered convictionâ, in what Rawls calls a reflective equilibriumâ. (288)
Here, we finally arrive at a Ricoeurian atemporal modernity. Similar to Amy Allenâs critique of Habermas, Ricoeur rejects the progressivist notion of modernity embedded in the latterâs communicative ethics. It is unclear throughout the text, however, what modernity means to Ricoeur.
