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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
In this series of interviews and dialogues which took place between 1981 and 2003, Paul Ricoeur addresses some of the central questions of political philosophy and ethics: justice, violence, war, the environmental crisis, the question of evil, ethical and political action in the polis. Philosophical issues are brought to bear on present-day concerns and the practical realities of contemporary politics. How can the philosopher speak about politics without claiming superior insight or a higher order of knowledge? Ricoeur distinguishes three levels of society: 'tools' (modes of production and the accumulation of technology), 'institutions' (which are tied to national cultures) and 'values' (which claim to be universal). The philosopher's task is to probe each of these levels and open up spaces for reflection, criticism and democratic deliberation. It is to explore the paradoxes of the political rather than invoking certainties dictated by conscience. Just as there no longer exists a grand narrative about the past, so too there is no longer any utopia capable of projecting the desired future. What remains is human creativity, which marks the source common to the institutional frameworks that are already present and the horizons that extend beyond them. The philosopher's engagement lies in the promise to revive this source at the very moment it appears to dry up under the weight of the real. This volume of interviews and dialogues with one of the most important French philosophers of the post-war period will be of interest to anyone interested in the great political and ethical questions of our time.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Preface by Michaël Foessel
Notes
1. I’m Waiting for the Renaissance
Notes
2. Sketch of a Plea for the Capable Human Being
Notes
3. Paul Ricoeur: Act, He Said
Note
4. The
Polis
is Fundamentally Perishable – Its Survival Depends on Us
Notes
5. History as Narrative and as Practice
Notes
6. Justice and the Market
An ethics of responsibility
From procedures to values
State, violence, and legitimacy
Notes
7. For an Ethics of Compromise
Notes
8. Any News of the War?
Notes
9. The Challenge of Evil for Philosophy
Notes
10. Ethics, Politics, Ecology
Notes
11. Ethics, Between Bad and Worse
Ethics and living-well
Ethics and reciprocity
Ethics and exceptions
Ethics and dogmatism
Notes
12. Art, Language, and Aesthetic Hermeneutics
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Philosophy, Ethics, and Politics
Paul Ricoeur
Edited by Catherine Goldenstein
Translated by Kathleen Blamey
polity
Copyright Page
Originally published in French as Philosophie, éthique et politique: Entretiens et dialogues. Textes prepares et présentés par Catherine Goldenstein. Préface de Michaël Fœssel © Editions du Seuil, 2017
“L’Ethique, entre le mal et le pire.” Un échange de vues entre le philosophe Paul Ricoeur et le Pr. Yves Pélicier, Psychiatre. Propos recueillis par Christian Ballouard et Sophie Duméry, in Ethique médicale ou bioéthique?, Christian Hervé (éd.), collection L’Ethique en mouvement, © Editions de l’Harmattan, 1997.
This English edition © Polity Press, 2020
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3450-0- hardback
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Names: Ricœur, Paul, author. | Goldenstein, Catherine, editor. | Blamey, Kathleen, translator.
Title: Philosophy, ethics and politics / Paul Ricoeur ; edited by Catherine Goldenstein ; translated by Kathleen Blamey.
Other titles: Philosophie, éthique et politique. English
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA, USA : Polity, 2020. | “Originally published in French as Philosophie, éthique et politique: Entretiens et dialogues. Textes prepares et présentés par Catherine Goldenstein. Préface de Michaël Fœssel Editions du Seuil, 2017.” | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “One of leading philosophers of the twentieth century addresses some of the central questions of political philosophy and ethics”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020005433 (print) | LCCN 2020005434 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509534500 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509534517 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509534524 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Ricœur, Paul--Interviews. | Philosophers--France--Interviews. | Political science--Philosophy.
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Preface: Paul Ricoeur, Political Educator
“You never know what is chance and what is fate.” This admission of ignorance, appearing in the first of the interviews collected here (p. 5), was often repeated by Paul Ricoeur. Whether it was a matter of accounting for the internal coherence of his work, his intellectual commitments, or his political positions, Ricoeur never believed that biographical knowledge could attain the level of science. What might be daunting in the question of the unity of one’s life for the person asking it can be mitigated by the concept of “narrative identity.”1 A narrative allows the contingency of events and the necessity attaching to the character or the historical conditions of the subject to be organized into a plot. Instead of relying on reason, he turns to imagination to link chance to fate. New narratives about the same series of events are always possible; not all of these, moreover, are recounted in the first person. In this way, the plurality of plots avoids confusing the bygone past with the inevitable.
The concern with avoiding a premature conclusion is found in most of the dialogues to be read in this volume. Of course, these are historically situated: taking place between 1981 and 2003, they correspond to what could be called Ricoeur’s fully mature period, opening with Time and Narrative (volume one appeared in 1983) and concluding with Memory, History, and Forgetting (2000). From a biographical standpoint, this period corresponds with Ricoeur’s return to the French intellectual stage. This is a “return” because in the 1950s and ’60s Ricoeur played an important role in public debate, in particular in the journal Esprit. During this period, he established the rules for what he conceived to be the engagement of the philosopher with the Polis. As we shall see, this deontology of participation in public discourse will waver no more.
The 1970s, however, represent a step back with respect to the French intellectual stage. Here too, the shares of chance and fate are difficult to measure. Ricoeur abstains from intervening in a field dominated by Marxism and structuralism; he refrains from speaking in response to the incomprehension generated by his institutional role at Nanterre in 1969, but he also takes advantage of the opportunity to teach in the United States and the encounter with new philosophical approaches. Perhaps, in addition, he was attesting to a conviction he never ceased to hold: the opacity of the present for its contemporaries. Physically absent from the debates of the intelligentsia in France, he confronts them at a distance from the noise of the media. From Chicago, he studies Althusser’s interpretation of Marx.2
The interviews collected in this volume thus belong to a period in which Ricoeur deems it possible to once again let his voice be heard in France. Chance solicitations play an important role, but there is no doubt that the reduction of ideological polarities in the course of the 1980s assisted in this return to favor. What is heard is not “moderation” or “ecumenism” with which the philosopher was so often reproached, but the method to which he submitted each of his interventions. One characteristic of Ricoeur’s thought is, in fact, never separating the study of a problem (the will, interpretation, action, time, etc.) from questions of method. There is no hiatus between what philosophy does and the reflection on what it can do: describing the will is also questioning the limits of phenomenology with respect to the question of evil;3 thinking about time is also delegating to narrative what reason alone cannot comprehend.4
What is true about the philosophy is also true about the philosopher who expresses himself publicly without claiming a higher order of knowledge. Ricoeur thematizes this method of intervention as early as 1965 in “Tâches de l’éducateur politique” [“Tasks of the Political Educator”], his most extensive text on the question of engagement.5 Despite its Platonic undertones, the expression “political educator” refers to the pedagogical effort Ricoeur appreciated in Pierre Mendès-France and that he found again later in Michel Rocard (see their dialogue, Chapter 6). To the extent he exposes his thought to the risks inherent in social transformation, the philosopher himself is also expected to specify the areas of his intervention. In this text, Ricoeur distinguishes three levels of society: “tools” (modes of production and the global accumulation of technology), “institutions” (whose character is tied to national cultures), and “values” (which claim to be universal). The discourse of the political educator cannot be confined to the abstract level of values if it hopes to avoid the danger of succumbing to “the deadly illusion of a disengaged, disincarnated conception of the intellectual.”6
Instead of legislating, the philosopher has to cross through the universe of tools and the sphere of institutions. The vocabulary will change, but the standards will be just as exacting in the interviews we read. To escape technocracy, the political educator will bring out what, in existing societies, already goes beyond the commensurable. These are the stakes of Ricoeur’s reflection on the heterogeneity of social goods and the differences between “spheres of justice” (Michael Walzer). At the very moment the Soviet bureaucracy is disappearing, Ricoeur warns against the appearance, at the heart of triumphant capitalism, of other forms of administrated powers. The false homogeneity of “tools” can, in fact, give the illusion of a self-regulating society in which choices are made by no one and as a result call for no confrontation. At this level, the intellectual’s responsibility is to reintroduce conflict. This key word in Ricoeur marks the philosopher’s contribution to the critique of technology and economics. Behind the production of machines and the apparently anonymous logic of growth, we find decisions taken in a conflictual context which has been repressed. The primary task of the political educator is to open up a space once more for democratic confrontation, where the will seems to have capitulated to the rationality of instruments.7
The second level is that of “institutions”; it concerns the principles presiding over the choice of the preferable (equality, liberty, justice). Once it is established that human creativity is at work even in the domains of technology and economics, the problem of the criteria for action is posed. In the pages that follow, we see the attempts to apply to concrete cases the distinctions Ricoeur has made in the field of action. In particular, the three levels of morality (the ethics of the good life, the deontology of norms, practical wisdom in situation) will help to shed light on the difficulties encountered in medicine (Chapter 11) or in international relations (Chapter 8). Here again, this pluralizing of viewpoints is a valuable contribution of the political educator. Ricoeur marks the limits of the procedural conceptions of the Rule of Law by examining the aporias generated by democracy. The moment of the institutions is fundamental because it organizes the confrontation without ever setting a definite end to it. Ricoeur’s strategy continues to be the “long detour”: the (modern) impossibility of a sharp decision among substantial conceptions of the good tends toward a culture of conflict. Without it, “le compromis” (genuine compromise) is inevitably lost to “la compromission” (compromising one’s values or character) (Chapter 7).
This twofold effort of conceptual clarification (on the level of technologies and on the level of institutions) is already part of the intellectual’s engagement. The intellectual’s vocation is not to express an opinion on “values,” as if his discourse were free of all historical responsibility. The 1965 article stresses this point, borrowing from Max Weber the distinction between the “ethics of responsibility” and “the ethics of conviction.” The intellectual’s engagement is not only a function of his freedom, it also stems from the fact of being always already caught up in a history in which the individual does not control all the parameters. His responsibility consists in exploring the “paradoxes of the political” rather than relying on certainties dictated by conscience.8 Is this to say that political education is limited to an appeal to realism justified by the necessities of power? Not at all. The political educator accomplishes his task only by recalling “the constant pressure that the ethics of conviction exercises on the ethics of responsibility.”9 The name of this pressure is “utopia”: this word is frequently pronounced in the interviews collected in this volume.10
As much as the social and institutional analysis proceeds through a variation of possibilities based on what already exists, to the same extent utopia allows a radically new possibility to appear. Its dimension is an exile outside of established political and economic orders. Ricoeur long advocated in favor of the concrete utopias at work, for example, in certain religious communities. These communities practice forms of association in the world that escape the logic of technological domination.11 Later, he will define utopia as a product of the social imagination that is opposed to ideology: ideology integrates action into a pre-existing social symbolism, while utopia claims a “nowhere,” in contrast with which ideologies appear in their contingency.12 As the collective expression of a constituting imaginary, utopia serves a subversive function. Responding to its call, a consciousness situated in a world of equipment and institutions becomes a consciousness of “nowhere.”
The political educator, in this way, divides this task between exploring a here and designating an elsewhere. To be sure, “we still perceive some islands of rationality, but we no longer have the means to situate them within an archipelago of unique and all-encompassing meanings” (p. 17). Just as there no longer exists a grand narrative to recapitulate the past, in the same way there is no longer any utopia capable of projecting the desired future. According to Ricoeur, what remains is human social creativity, which marks the source common to the institutional frameworks that are already present and the horizons that extend beyond them. The philosopher’s engagement lies in the promise to revive this source at the very moment it appears to dry up under the weight of the constraints of “the real.”
Michaël Foessel
Notes
1
See Paul Ricoeur,
Oneself as Another
, tr. K. Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). “Life: A Story in Search of a Narrator,” in
On Psychoanalysis
, tr. D. Pellauer (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012).
2
See Paul Ricoeur,
Lectures on Ideology and Utopia
, ed. G. Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
3
See Paul Ricoeur,
The Symbolism of Evil
, tr. E. Buchanan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967).
4
See Paul Ricoeur,
Time and Narrative
, tr. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer, 3 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984, 1985, 1988).
5
Paul Ricoeur, “Tâches de l’éducateur politique,” in
Lectures 1. Autour du politique
(Paris: Le Seuil, 1991), pp. 239–55. The importance of this text is signaled by Ricoeur as he returns to it in one of the interviews published here, Chapter 4, pp. 42–3: “The task of a political educator is also to continually channel back into the flow of public discussion all that is abusively monopolized by the specialists.”
6
Ricoeur, “Tâches de l’éducateur politique,” p. 248.
7
This is the sense of Ricoeur’s foray into the domain of ecology (Chapter 10).
8
See Paul Ricoeur, “The Political Paradox,” a crucial text written in the aftermath of the events in Budapest in 1956, in
History and Truth
, tr. C. A. Kelby (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965).
9
Ricoeur, “Tâches de l’éducateur politique,” p. 251.
10
“Only utopia can give economic, social, and political action a human aim and, in my opinion, a twofold aim: on the one hand, envisioning humanity as a whole; on the other hand, envisioning the person as a singularity” (“Tâches de l’éducateur politique,” p. 252). Here again, the vocabulary will change (becoming less personalist), but the positive function of utopia in the social imagination will be affirmed throughout the work.
11
See Paul Ricoeur,
Plaidoyer pour l’utopie ecclésiale
(Paris: Labor et Fides, 2016).
12
See Paul Ricoeur, “Ideology and Utopia,” in
From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II
, tr. K. Blamey and J. Thompson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991), pp. 308–24.
1. I’m Waiting for the Renaissance1
JOËL ROMAN AND ÉTIENNE TASSIN: Your first published book, in collaboration with Mikel Dufrenne,2is a study devoted to Jaspers. How did you become interested in Jaspers?
PAUL RICOEUR: Before the war, Gabriel Marcel had published the first studies in French on Jaspers, in particular a long article on limit-situations, which really struck me because I was then just starting to focus on the problem of culpability. Later, when we were prisoners of war, Mikel Dufrenne and I were fortunate to have access to the entirety of Jasper’s works in publication at that time. Our attachment to Jaspers was tied to our refusal to repeat the mistake of our predecessors, the veterans of the previous war, who had harshly rejected everything that came from Germany. We thought that the true Germans were in books, and this was a way of rejecting the Germans who were guarding us. The true Germany was us and not them. In publishing this book, in a sense we erased the history of our captivity.
After the war, when Jaspers published works such as The Great Philosophers3 or Von der Wahrheit,4 we no longer followed his work. I have to recognize that what occurred at that time was a substitution, in part, of Heidegger for Jaspers, which I now tend to question: in many respects, there were ethical and political criteria inherent in Jaspers’ thought – that is, constitutive of it – that made even clearer the ethical elision that increasingly appears to me to characterize Heidegger’s thought. Retrospectively, Jaspers leaves me with regret and unease, for I sometimes have the feeling of abandoning him along the way, not having continued this post-war encounter.
Did you meet him personally?
Yes, on two occasions. Just after the war, in Heidelberg, then in Basel. By then he had broken with Germany: while he had endured Nazi Germany, he had not endured democratic Germany, which at that time had not repented. He had dreamt of a sort of collective conversion, a collective avowal of responsibility. I met him in Switzerland just after publishing our book: I wouldn’t say he didn’t like it, but he found it too systematic, overly marked perhaps by its French and didactic spirit, whereas he saw himself more in the image of a mighty torrent sweeping away its banks, which we had channeled.
Over the same years, you encountered Husserl’s phenomenology?
I had already caught wind of it before the war, and at Gabriel Marcel’s, curiously enough. Then I read the Logical Investigations.5 It was one of the faithful attendees of Gabriel Marcel’s “Fridays,” Maxime Chastaing, who directed me to Husserl. Finally, imprisoned in Germany, I had the chance to have a copy of Husserl’s Ideen,6 the first volume of which I translated. I still have the copy from those years of captivity, which I managed to bring back with me despite many obstacles. The translation was written in the margins since we had no paper. In translating Husserl, I had to make a number of choices in translating terms, choices I would not make in the same way today. For example, I did not dare to translate Seiende by “étant” (entity) but by “ce qui est” (that which is). Be that as it may, for me this book has remained absolutely fundamental.
In From Text to Action there is an article titled “From Phenomenology to Hermeneutics,” in which I explain that the passage by way of phenomenology is not canceled by a development that more fully takes into account the plurality of interpretations, although in Husserl we find the idea that there are univocal essences about which a coherent discourse can be formulated.
Did you come to hermeneutics later?
I first came to it by way of a problem arising out of my work on the symbolism of evil, which followed a classical phenomenological study on the voluntary and the involuntary. In the latter, I proposed to do for the field of practice what Merleau-Ponty had done for perception. I am returning now, moreover, to the same questions from the angle of the theory of action. In working on the voluntary and the involuntary, I was relying on clearly readable structures: it is possible to express in intelligible terms the nature of a project, a motive, a capacity for action, an emotion, a habit, and so on. These are, in a sense, the chapters of a phenomenological psychology. But there remained an opaque area, that of bad will and evil. It seemed to me then that I had to change methods, that is, to interpret myths, not just biblical myths but also the myths of tragedy, of orphism, of gnosis. By this symbolic detour, I entered into the hermeneutical problem. Certain problems did not have the clarity, the transparency, I thought I discerned in what Merleau-Ponty termed the “membranes” of voluntary acts. Out of this arose two questions: 1. What can we say about the subject who can know himself or herself only by way of myths? What is the opacity of the self to itself that results in having to pass through the interpretation of grand cultural narratives to arrive at self-understanding? 2. Inversely, what is the status of the interpretive operation that serves as the mediation between the self and itself in this reflexive act? Here, I took the route by way of Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer. This hermeneutical trajectory seemed to me to repeat the neo-Kantian trajectory of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. I also crossed paths with Nietzsche, who interested me for his critique of transparency and of the self-mastery of rationality. All of these investigations were guided by the question: what can we say about the subject through these various revolutions? How can we move from a position that remains relatively Cartesian in Husserl, in the name of a sort of immediacy to oneself, to the recognition of a growing opacity witnessed in the detour by way of myths?
The second shock, alongside that of the hermeneutical tradition, was the shock of psychoanalysis, and for similar reasons. Having worked on culpability through the lens of the great myths, I wondered if there was not another, very different, reading, leading back to the side of the unconscious and not to the side of the great textual tradition. This was the occasion for my work on Freud,7 strongly motivated by the failure of a philosophy of the cogito. A twofold failure, on the battlefront of the reading of myths and on the battlefront of the deciphering of the unconscious. In this way, I was led back to my earlier problem, the plurality of hermeneutics and their conflicts.
What has become of this conflict of interpretations? I was entering into a dialectical game, either giving credit to a text, or instead mistrusting it. This dialectic of suspicion/trust played a very important role for me. Systematic mistrust had its Nietzschean and Freudian roots – Marxist too, but, curiously, I was never deeply disturbed by Marx. I did not see in him the power of disruption I found in Nietzsche or Freud. I was interested in Marx for other reasons: for the problem of ideology as a deceptive form of knowledge. My most recent book dealing with the relations between “ideology and utopia,”8 expresses quite well the crux of my relation to Marx, which is a rather tranquil relation, whereas I have always found Nietzsche more invigorating.
Finally, there was the “linguistic turn” leading you to take a closer interest in what is commonly termed “Anglo-Saxon philosophy.”
The linguistic turn for me was made inside of hermeneutics, because to reflect on myths is to remain within language. As I was frequently employing the notions of symbol and symbolism in my works on the symbolism of evil and on Freud, I realized that my own use of the word “symbol” lacked a linguistic foundation. I had to go back and start again from Saussure and, especially, from Benveniste: from the latter, I retained the notion of the irreducibility of discourse to the word, and so of the linguistics of the sentence to the linguistics of the sign. Concurrently, I was encountering analytical philosophy in its dual forms: the analysis of ordinary language, and the philosophy of well-constructed languages, logical languages. I always found solid support in the tradition of Austin, Strawson, etc., who started with what people say, with the idea that ordinary language contains an unbelievable wealth of meaning. This connection between phenomenology, linguistics, and analytical philosophy, in its least logicist aspect, gave me the resources of hybridization to which I owe so much. Analytical philosophy continues to fascinate me by its level of argumentation. This is what forces our respect: the choice of arguments, counterexamples, rejoinders. At times the object of analysis is slighter than the instrument of analysis: this is what we in France often perceive, we who have difficulty opening ourselves to this argumentative rigor. The flipside of this attitude is the professionalization of philosophical activity. I myself am somewhat of a victim of this effect: no longer writing for the general public, but writing for the greatest specialist in one’s discipline, the one you have to convince.
How is it that you have split your time between the United States and France? Is it the result of chance, or were there possibilities of work in the United States that attracted you?
You never know what is chance and what is fate. I have often been struck by the fact that the anecdotal becomes the necessary after the fact. When I returned from Germany after my captivity, looking for somewhere to regain my health, I taught for three years in Chambon-sur-Lignon in a small Protestant secondary school in the mountains, where pacifist American Quakers had come to the aid of French teachers and educators who had participated in non-violent resistance in aiding the Jews. The first time I visited the United States it was to a Quaker college. The Quakers were the first American link during the period of reconstruction within the small province of French Protestantism. Then I taught in New York until 1970, when I was appointed as a visiting professor to the Divinity School and the Philosophy Department of the University of Chicago. I have since divided my time, in the proportion of two thirds/one third, between France and the United States. I continue to teach there.
You have had university responsibilities in France. What are your thoughts in comparing the two university systems?
The comparison makes obvious first of all the poverty of the French system: it is just simply cruel. To be sure, in Chicago I taught in a very selective framework, with students in doctoral programs: one could have no more than twenty-five students at once, direct no more than five dissertations, etc. This is just in no way comparable to what I experienced at the Sorbonne, which, moreover, I had already left to go to Nanterre, before taking early retirement.
I had not been happy in that system for pedagogical reasons: it is a system that gives little credit to students, that does not afford them the means to do research. An American student has no more than twenty hours of class, while a French student often has a lot more, up to thirty-five hours in some disciplines. A student’s work consists in taking in the courses and regurgitating them; there is no engagement with the texts, with the library. This question really disturbs me: how is it possible that societies so similar in other ways, advanced industrial societies, can have produced such different systems of education? This is indisputably where the imprint of history is the strongest, to such an extent that our systems are practically incommunicable, even in Europe. Systems of education are the most difficult to reform. It is a paradox that a system of education is supposed to be the most forward looking, since by definition we are dealing with people who will be operational ten or twenty years later. Yet we have a tendency to teach as we were taught; there is something very regressive in the role of a teacher. In systems in which innovation is more highly prized, as in the American system, one is led to reflect more on one’s practice and to be creative, inventive. You can have a short seminar, a seminar where you never speak, a seminar where two or three people speak: anything is permitted, as long as the students show up.
You have been very active in the International Institute of Philosophy, and have served as its president. What role does this kind of institution play?
It is by invitation only: there are nine French philosophers, five English philosophers, nine Americans, etc., one hundred and ten or twenty members in all. Each year, the Institute holds a meeting on a rather technical subject; this year the theme will be: “signifying and understanding.” There is a clear Anglo-American slant, but also a strong Continental counterpart: Gadamer and Habermas for Germany, and, on the French side, Granger, who is rather close to the Anglo-American tradition, but also Aubenque and Levinas. This is a milieu of very high-level discussion, but also a meeting place, more so than the large international symposia. The international congresses of philosophy, held every five years, are open more widely, while the meetings of the Institute are more selective. But the Institute is also the only place where analytical philosophy, which tends to be dominant, at times contemptuous, accepts a reciprocal encounter. Conversely, here “Continental” philosophers have discovered the wide variety of so-called “analytical” philosophy and the possibilities of hybridization with so-called “Continental” philosophy. The marriage between Kantian transcendentalism and Anglo-Saxon pragmatism, which is evidenced for example in Habermas’s work, is in this respect a very important cultural event, one that is not, however, without pitfalls as it tends to construct an American-German bridge above our heads. From this standpoint, I am not convinced that ruminating over the Heideggerian heritage is the best way to maintain contact with the Germanic world in order to keep it from completely tipping over into the American universe. German thought, moreover, suffers from certain defects it shares with French thought: the recourse to history, the endless recapitulation of the tradition (Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel), with which people like Habermas and Luhmann have broken, being less overwhelmed by the historical tradition than we are. I don’t say this negatively, for there is always the risk, on the other side, of a thought lacking memory.
Bloom, it seems, charged Rawls with a lack of education.9 French philosophy, however, has difficulty exiting two impasses: rereading the classics, with the intent, to be sure, of understanding them better and better; and, on the other hand, an inability to take on new subjects. The question is endlessly posed whether philosophy is dead, whether philosophy is possible for itself; one cannot endlessly do the philosophy of philosophy, but must move beyond this to think about something, breaking with this aspect of commentary and marginal notation, even in the strong sense that Derrida has given to the word “margin,” but which always amounts to writing in the margin of the greats.
And yet, this was the intention of phenomenology at the outset?
Indeed, it was a matter of placing oneself before specific objects and phenomena in order to ask oneself on a domain-specific basis about ways of positing something, without positivism. The lack of concern for ways of positing things disturbs me in contemporary French philosophy: it leaves the field open for an epistemology that adopts what others have posited. A glaring example of this today is Granger, who declares that philosophy has no object, only sciences have an object.10 I believe that we have to rediscover an object. For example: what does it mean to be a living being in the world – acting, suffering, speaking? I would defend the idea of a philosophical anthropology, which is often treated with disdain, in particular by those heirs of Heidegger who condemn an anthropological reading of Heidegger. On the contrary, what I find great in Heidegger is his philosophical anthropology.
Is there not, however, a positive aspect in the critique of the non-thematized philosophical anthropologies at work in the human sciences, for example in Lévi-Strauss and Piaget? These are anthropologies of “neuronal man,” postulating a fundamental reductionism.
Yes, but how can one denounce reductionism, unless one can present in opposition to it certain irreducible ways of positing things? However, what I am more critical of is not so much the idea that man is dead, but its counterpart: that man is recent. In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, books III and IV sketch out a philosophical anthropology that aims to show how the ethical and political capacity of human beings is ontologically possible. What sort of being must a human being be to be capable of decision, and so to be a political subject as well? A political philosophy constructed on an anthropological void seems to me doomed to be purely procedural: its sole political theme is then procedural coherence, something with which Rawls, precisely, has been reproached. But Rawls’s argument is also based on what he calls “considered convictions”: these rest, I think, on a certain invariant in ethical formalism. There are common convictions: we have always known that a person is not a thing, and the philosopher’s responsibility is to say what the differential features are that make a person worthy of respect simply by being a person. When you look at current questions in medical ethics, they demonstrate the fruitfulness of Kantian formalism in reflecting on these problems.
I am wary of the Hegelian idea that the moral principle should be replaced by Sittlichkeit under the pretext that the former is empty. And what if the latter is corrupted? Sittlichkeit did not prevent the advent of Nazism: what resisted was the upright Moralität of some people, like Bonhœffer and others, based on a certain idea of human beings. From this point of view as well, I would break with the Heideggerian idea that there is a single metaphysics and that it has ended. I believe, on the contrary, that there have been metaphysics in the plural, and that we have always had to choose our camp. I see nothing outmoded in the philosophy of the past. There have been various positions, open to unexpected Renaissances: who could have thought that Europe in the twelfth century would be Platonic? I am waiting for the Renaissance.
Do you cross paths here with Levinas’s reflection?
I owe much to him, but resist two points: first, the idea that ethics is to be developed without an ontology (a pretext stemming from Heidegger, and perhaps, beyond Heidegger, from Nietzsche). I am indeed not sure that the idea of being has to exhaust itself in a synoptic, virtually totalitarian, representation – in any case, one locked around the Self and requiring that the Other break in to enter. Isn’t there a possible ontology of act and power? Is there no way of reworking a miscarried ontology such as this? The philosophical tradition preserves certain clues, certain promises in this regard, for example in Spinoza’s conatus, or Leibniz’s dynamism, or again in Schelling. Ontology must not be aligned with substance or with essence. Vacant and incomplete ontologies can be appropriated for ethical alternatives and joined to problematics of otherness like that of Levinas.
The second resistance stems from the fact that the primacy of otherness is pushed so far by Levinas that it tends to remove all consistency from the “I.” When Levinas says that responsibility requires absolute passivity from me, that I am the receptor of an act that is not mine, and that this passivity must not turn back into action, with my becoming once again the master, to be sure, he forces us to think by moving the needle to the other side, in opposition to Husserlian egology. But if there were not in subjectivity the capacity to initiate, how could the response come: “Here I am”? How could the other awaken in me the ability to respond, if there were not in subjectivity a sort of latent capacity for acting? And this leads us to the Kantian antinomy: what is a subject capable of acting? These are my points of resistance when I read Levinas. At the same time, they express my debt. I too struggle against the idea that I am the master of sense. I have written about this, speaking of the “wounded cogito.”
In addition, I perceive in many French philosophers the tendency to dismiss the human sciences, which seems dangerous to me; when philosophy exiles itself from established sciences, it can then be in dialogue only with itself. Now, all the great philosophies have been in dialogue with a science: Plato with geometry, Descartes with algebra, Kant with physics, Bergson with evolution. For a philosophical anthropology, its partners are the human sciences. The established sciences are too quickly cast aside with an antipositivist argument, which is turning into a lazy argument. One has to earn the right to respond to arguments one judges to be positivist. If all we have to offer is the self-destruction of philosophy, we leave the field open for positivisms; today we see scientists forced to come up with a provisional philosophy, because philosophers are deserting the philosophical object. This worries me: I see in this retreat at once an arrogance and an excessive modesty. I am shocked by statements like those that open the work of Lacoue-Labarthe for example,11 on the impossibility of continuing philosophy.
The discourse of ethical nakedness in Levinas, on the one hand, and the discourse of the end of philosophy on the other, leave a void in the middle, allowing the sciences to take up the themes abandoned by philosophy.
