10.13135/2036-542X/7972
This paper sets out to reappraise Ricoeur’s theory of the self, offering a critical commentary on three important theses regarding Oneself as Another: those of Domenico Jervolino, Johann Michel and Jean Greisch. It challenges the commonly held assumption that the “hermeneutics of the self,” which Ricoeur introduces in that work, is continuous with his earlier works on a “reform” of subjectivity. It discusses three considerations which indicate that, from the mid to late 1980’s onwards, Ricoeur did not view “the subject” and “the self ” as one and the same. It argues that the “guiding thread” in Ricoeur’s work is infact a critical engagement with Descartes’ Second Meditation. This sustained but evolving critique of the Second Meditation is almost always the occasion for innovation. However, when it occurs in Oneself as Another it gives rise to a revolution: a break with the “philosophies of the subject” and a rapprochement with Heidegger.
application/pdf
2036-542X
7972
2
it
Eileen Brennan
Trópos
Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of the Self
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unito.it/index.php/tropos
8
Monografica
2015-12-01
2023-07-30
2015-12-01
2023-07-30
11-30
1
Eileen Brennan
2015/12/01
10.13135/2036-542X/7972
11
Dublin City University
2036-542X
2
30
Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of the Self
https://ojs.unito.it/index.php/tropos/article/download/7972/6701
8
                                                        trópos • anno VIII • numero 2 • 2015 – ISBN 978-88-548-9061-9
                                                           DOI 10.4399/97888548906192 – pag. 11-30 (dicembre 2015)




                      Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of the Self
                                                                                  E B*




   : This paper sets out to reappraise Ricoeur’s theory of the self, offering
      a critical commentary on three important theses regarding Oneself as Another:
      those of Domenico Jervolino, Johann Michel and Jean Greisch. It challenges the
      commonly held assumption that the “hermeneutics of the self,” which Ricoeur
      introduces in that work, is continuous with his earlier works on a “reform” of
      subjectivity. It discusses three considerations which indicate that, from the mid
      to late ’s onwards, Ricoeur did not view “the subject” and “the self ” as
      one and the same. It argues that the “guiding thread” in Ricoeur’s work is in
      fact a critical engagement with Descartes’ Second Meditation. This sustained
      but evolving critique of the Second Meditation is almost always the occasion
      for innovation. However, when it occurs in Oneself as Another it gives rise to a
      revolution: a break with the “philosophies of the subject” and a rapprochement
      with Heidegger.

   : Attestation, hermeneutics of the self, philosophies of the subject, psy-
      choanalytic critique of the cogito, wounded cogito.



Paul Ricoeur’s perspective on his own work was somewhat different from
the perspective shared by many of his supporters. Take, for example, the
following response that Ricoeur gave to John B. Thompson’s “substantial
introduction” to Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences:

   The perspective which he proposes [on my work from  to ] corrects the
   inverse impression, to which I have a tendency to succumb: that of a certain lack of
   continuity in my writings. For each work responds to a determinate challenge, and
   what connects it to its predecessors seems to me to be less the steady development
   of a unique project than the acknowledgement of a residue left over by the previous
   work, a residue which gives rise in turn to a new project. (Ricoeur : )

   Ricoeur appears to welcome the interplay of two perspectives here: his
original impression of his own work and Thompson’s corrective. The two
contrary impressions are apparently well–founded with each one revealing
what we might call, an element of truth. Ricoeur is certainly not prepared
   ∗
       Eileen Brennan, Dublin City University (eileen.brennan@dcu.ie).


                                                                                                                 
    Eileen Brennan


to concede that his own assessment was mistaken. As he points out, each of
his works responds to a determinate challenge and appears, to its author
at least, to be connected to its predecessors, but only to the extent that
it acknowledges that those works have left certain questions unanswered,
which it now plans to take up and form into “a new project.” Twenty years
later Ricoeur was still describing the relationships among his many works
in precisely those terms. Consider the following statement made in Lectio
magistralis, which was first published as the appendix to Domenico Jer-
volino’s Paul Ricoeur: Une herméneutique de la condition humaine: “Like all my
earlier works, [Memory, History, Forgetting] has its origin in the discovery and
consideration of residual questions, i.e., those left unanswered in an earlier
work.” ( Jervolino : , my translation) On that occasion, it was Jer-
volino who would assume the role of respondent, suggesting that Ricoeur’s
account of the way his work had evolved should be counterbalanced by a
demonstration of “the unity and coherence of his philosophical itinerary.”
( Jervolino : )
     There is one work, however, that does not appear to fit the usual pattern.
Oneself as Another is distinctive in that a first draft of that work appeared
to be a straightforward attempt to synthesize several decades of research
in areas as diverse as: () the philosophy of language; () the philosophy of
action; () narrative theory; and () moral philosophy. In short, its sole focus
was ostensibly the unity and continuity of Ricoeur’s work. Further, this
sense of consolidating diverse aspects of a single project appeared to carry
over into the final draft. But all was not as it seemed. Ricoeur’s strategy
for synthesizing the work, at least first time around, was to take all the
questions he had dealt with in the past and divide them into four categories:
() “Who speaks?”; () “Who acts?”; () “Who recounts?”; and () “Who
takes responsibility for their actions?” And crucially, he then commented
that those four groups of questions could be arranged around the central
question, “Who?”. ( Jervolino : ) Unlike the others he had listed, this
was not a question he had dealt with in the past. It was, rather, the “residual”
question that he would try to answer next. The task facing Ricoeur, in
Oneself as Another, was not, then, just a matter of showing how various
works contributed to a unified scheme. Like all of the works that preceded
it, it had a question to answer; one that had already been raised in an earlier
text.
     However, it would seem that the uncharacteristic emphasis that Ricoeur
placed on the unity and continuity of his works, in Oneself as Another, has
had the effect of obscuring the originality of the central theme of that work:
the self. “The self ” is, as Ricoeur points out, the answer to the question
“Who?”. (Ricoeur : ) Coupling that statement with the evidence that
the book provides of a plan to synthesize decades of research in disparate
                                         Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of the Self   


fields, many commentators assume that the “guiding thread,” weaving
its way across Ricoeur’s earlier works and into Oneself as Another, is a
questioning, even a profound questioning of “the subject.” This is not
an unreasonable assumption to make but, as I hope to show, it is mistaken
nonetheless. The assumption is not unreasonable because Ricoeur spent
best part of four decades first developing and then defending his own very
distinctive philosophy of the subject; and there was no clear indication that
he was about to change course. However, it would be a mistake to view
the “hermeneutics of the self,” which he introduces in Oneself as Another,
as a hermeneutics of the subject. To equate the two is to disregard at least
three of the considerations that Ricoeur includes in the Introduction to
that work: () a plan to use a nominalized omnipersonal reflexive pronoun
in place of the singular subjective pronoun or “I;” () a declaration of his
intention to break with, or part ways with the “philosophies of the subject;”
and () an important indication that the “hermeneutics of the self ” will have
a different status to that of the “philosophies of the subject.” In this instance,
“status” means both epistemic quality and ontological commitments.
    In the first part of this paper, I discuss Ricoeur’s plans to break with the
“philosophies of the subject,” underscoring the revolutionary character of
those plans by showing how Ricoeur’s established philosophical interests
and past allegiances position all of his preceding works firmly within the
category that he now wants to leave behind. I then note the way he uses
the complex functioning of language as a guide when introducing his new
topic.
    In the second part of the paper, I argue that it is possible, nonetheless,
to identify a “guiding thread” in Ricoeur’s work, which first appears in the
early ’s and is still discernible in , the year he published Oneself as
Another. That “guiding thread” is Ricoeur’s sustained critical engagement
with Descartes’ Second Meditation. I try to show that it is this critical engage-
ment with the Second Meditation that has given us some of Ricoeur’s more
memorable and inventive ideas. I then try to demonstrate that, contrary to
appearances, there is no discrepancy between the first and final drafts of
Oneself as Another when it comes to the accounts that Ricoeur offers of the
way the central question — “Who?” — emerges in his work. Both accounts
allude, explicitly or otherwise, to a critical engagement with the Second
Meditation.
    In the third part, I discuss three important commentaries on Oneself as
Another, two of which do not make a distinction between “the subject” and
“the self.” I challenge the central theses of both commentaries by drawing
on the research presented and the arguments developed in parts one and
two. I then discuss the third commentary, which, as I indicate, is very much
in line with that research.
     Eileen Brennan


. Ricoeur’s “new project” in Oneself as Another

If the design and layout of Oneself as Another point to the unity and con-
tinuity of Ricoeur’s multiple works, comments made in the introduction
place considerable emphasis on an impending break with certain outmoded
philosophical interests, interests that Ricoeur once shared with Kant, Fichte,
and Husserl. Ricoeur declares that “the quarrel over the cogito” has been
“superseded;” and he talks about reaching a point where “our problematic
will have parted ways with the philosophies of the subject.” (Ricoeur : ,
my emphasis) But what does he mean by “the philosophies of the subject?”
He explains that he takes the expression to be “equivalent to ‘philosophies
of the cogito.’” (Ricoeur : ) Among those philosophies of the subject
(or cogito) he includes works that defend “the ambition of establishing a
final, ultimate foundation, primarily Descartes’s Meditations but also works
by Kant and Fichte, and Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations.” (Ricoeur : )
However, his list of “philosophies of the subject” is not confined to those
works; it also includes works by those who would shatter and “overthrow”
the cogito, chief among them being Nietzsche. In an effort to differentiate
the philosophy presented in Oneself as Another from those opposing “philoso-
phies of the subject,” Ricoeur says that it is “‘second philosophy,’ in the sense
that Manfred Riedel gives to this term.” (Ricoeur : ) He explains that
Riedel uses the term to identify a form of philosophy that arose “following
the failure of the cogito to be constituted as first philosophy and to resolve
the question of determining an ultimate foundation.” (Ricoeur : )
Ricoeur goes on to explain that Riedel’s expression, “second philosophy”
is equivalent to the expression, “practical philosophy.” He does not want
to claim that every aspect of Oneself as Another will count as “second” or
“practical philosophy,” but he wants to name one way in which it will. He
explains that the ten studies presented in that work “have as their thematic
unity human action and that the notion of action acquires, over the course
of the studies, an ever–increasing extension and concreteness.” (Ricoeur
: ) It is, he says, to this extent that “the philosophy that comes out of
this work deserves to be termed a practical philosophy and to be taken as
‘second philosophy,’ in the sense that Manfred Riedel gives to this term.”
(Ricoeur : )
    Viewed from the perspective of Ricoeur’s introduction, there is, then, a
certain lack of continuity between Oneself as Another and Ricoeur’s earlier
works, a situation which, I want to argue, coincides with the introduction
of a new project. However, before venturing to offer a detailed account
of what that new project entails, I would like to take a moment or two
to reflect on Ricoeur’s earlier association with the so–called “philosophies
of the subject,” because his new problematic is as far removed from his
                                                     Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of the Self           


earlier work as it is from all the other “philosophies of the subject,” whether
sympathetic to the idea of the cogito or emphatically anti–cogito. In an
essay entitled On Interpretation, which is included in the collection From
Text to Action, Ricoeur casts what Jean Greisch describes as “a retrospective
glance over the problems that have occupied him for about thirty years.”
(Greisch : , my translation) Ricoeur begins by offering a broad de-
scription of the “philosophical tradition” to which he belongs: “It stands in
the line of a reflexive philosophy; it remains within the sphere of Husserlian
phenomenology; it strives to be a hermeneutical variation of this phenomenol-
ogy.” (Ricoeur : ) Ricoeur knows that many of his readers will not
be familiar with the term, “reflexive philosophy,” so he offers a definition:
“By reflexive philosophy, I mean broadly speaking the mode of thought
stemming from the Cartesian cogito and handed down by way of Kant and
French post–Kantian philosophy, a philosophy that is little known abroad
and that, for me at least, was most strikingly represented by Jean Nabert.”
(Ricoeur : ) In providing that definition of the tradition of reflexive
philosophy, a tradition to which he claims to belong, Ricoeur positions
all of the works he published in the period from the ’s to the early
’s within the category of “the philosophies of the subject.” This, of
course, would explain the countless references we find, in those works, to
“the subject” and even to “the cogito.” But Ricoeur’s cogito is distinctive.
If we go back to The Question of the Subject: The Challenge of Semiology, an
essay included in The Conflict of Interpretations, we come upon the curious
expression, the “wounded cogito,” cogito blessé. (Ricoeur : ) But what
is it that makes this version of the cogito distinctive? Ricoeur defines the
“wounded cogito” as “a cogito which posits but does not possess itself, a cog-
ito which understands its primordial truth only in and through the avowal of
inadequation, the illusion, the fakery of immediate consciousness.” (Ricoeur
: ) He explains that he came to think of the cogito in those terms
after meditating on Freudian psychoanalysis. (Ricoeur : ) This partic-
ular conceptualization of the cogito finds an echo in Greisch’s expression,
“the hermeneutic cogito,” le cogito herméneutique.
    There is a second essay in The Conflict of Interpretations, entitled Existence
and Hermeneutics, which dramatizes Ricoeur’s profound transformation of
the cogito in, what for me, is an unforgettable way. There Ricoeur warns
that his decision to “graft” hermeneutics onto phenomenology will change
“the wild stock,” (i.e., phenomenology) causing the cogito to “explode.”
(Ricoeur : ) He would use another interesting metaphor, in ,
when describing the impact that Freudian psychoanalysis had on his work

     . J. G, Le Cogito herméneutique: l’herméneutique philosophique et l’héritage cartésien, Paris,
Vrin, .
       Eileen Brennan


in the ’s, a decade in which he wrote all the essays that comprise
The Conflict of Interpretations as well as Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on
Interpretation. That metaphor would depict psychoanalysis as a player in
a game of chess that had put in check “the philosophies of consciousness
stemming from Descartes, including the Husserlian phenomenology that I
myself had practiced in my early works.” ( Jervolino : –) Ricoeur
would then explain that he had to look to “the complex functioning of
language” for guidance when planning his defensive move. ( Jervolino :
)
    When reading the opening paragraphs of the introduction to Oneself
as Another it is important to remember that Ricoeur spent many decades
defending his own distinctive version of the cogito before making the
announcement that there would be a point where “our [new] problematic”
parts ways with the philosophies of the subject. He may list Descartes, Kant,
Fichte, Husserl, and even Nietzsche as philosophers who developed various
“philosophies of the subject,” but his philosophy of the “wounded cogito”
earns him a place on that list too. However, that is not to say that there
will be nothing to connect Oneself as Another to Ricoeur’s earlier works. It
is notable, for example, that when he introduces his new project he draws
support from the way “the grammars of natural languages” function, a
strategy that clearly recalls his earlier response to the threat posed to the
cogito by psychoanalysis. (Ricoeur : ) However, in this later work, he is
no longer looking to move the philosophies of consciousness out of check.
He wants, rather, to set up an opposition between the “I” of the “I think”
and “the self.” Here is how he describes what he was trying to achieve:

     The first intention [that influenced the preparation of the book] was to indicate
     the primacy of reflective meditation over the immediate positing of the subject, as
     this is expressed in the first person singular: “I think,” “I am.” This initial intention
     draws support from the grammars of natural languages inasmuch as they allow the
     opposition between “self ” and “I.” This support takes different forms following
     the peculiarities of each language. (Ricoeur : )

Ricoeur is clearly encouraged by the fact that the grammars of natural lan-
guages, like French, German, English, etc., “allow the opposition between
‘self ’ and ‘I.’” However, he wants to do far more than claim that it would
be a mistake to confuse the two. Demonstrating an on–going commitment
to phenomenological analysis, he goes in search of what he terms, “the
essential meaning” of “self.” (Ricoeur : )
    As Ricoeur notes, “self ” is a reflexive pronoun. There are, in English, eight
reflexive pronouns: myself, yourself, himself, herself, itself, ourselves, yourselves,
and themselves; and it is clear from the text, that if Ricoeur had been writing
in English, he would have used the term “self ” to cover all of them. But
                                           Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of the Self   


he goes even further than that. He writes: “I shall frequently refer in the
course of these investigations” to “the impersonal pronouns, such as ‘each,’
‘anyone,’ ‘one,’” and he signals that they too will be covered by the term
“self.” (Ricoeur : ) He concedes that “the philosophical use of the term
throughout these studies violates a restriction that has been stressed by
grammarians, namely that soi is a third–person reflexive pronoun (himself,
herself, itself ).” He then endeavours to lift that restriction by comparing
soi and se (as in se présenter and se nommer). Drawing on the work of the
linguist G. Guillaume, he is able to show that because “se” relates to verbs
in the form of the infinitive, i.e., verbs that are not “distributed among
the tenses and the grammatical persons,” there is no restriction on the
pronouns it can designate. Then, comparing se and soi, he notes that “the
reflexive pronoun soi also attains the same timeless range [la même amplitude
omnitemporelle] when it is added to the se in the infinitive mode: se décider
soi–même.” (Ricoeur : )
    It seems to me that when Ricoeur seizes the opportunity to oppose
“I” and “self,” afforded him by the grammars of a number of European
languages, he takes an important first step in demarcating his new research
topic. No longer prepared to use the singular subject pronoun, “I,” he has
reached what we might consider a first staging post: “an omnipersonal
reflexive pronoun.” (Ricoeur : ) But Ricoeur quickly moves on to
nominalize that pronoun, so that his topic becomes “the self ” (le soi). As
he explains: “The shift from one expression to the other is permitted by
the grammatical capacity for nominalizing any element of language: do we
not say ‘the drink,’ ‘the beautiful,’ ‘the bright day?.’” (Ricoeur : ) He
also points out that “the self ” can function as the indirect object of another
noun, and to illustrate the point he borrows “Michel Foucault’s magnificent
title: le souci de soi (care of the self ).” (Ricoeur : ) It is interesting that
he should align what he is attempting to do, in Oneself as Another, with the
work of Foucault, someone whose name is so often associated with the
thesis of “the death of the subject.”
    The more obvious connection, however, is with Martin Heidegger
and Hans–Georg Gadamer, two hermeneutic philosophers who reject the
subject–object conceptuality favoured by Husserl. In an essay entitled Phe-
nomenology and Hermeneutics, which is included in the collection From Text
to Action, Ricoeur offers a brief sketch of the main problem associated with
this type of conceptuality. He notes that Husserl employs the subject–object
conceptuality, in the epilogue to Ideas, whilst articulating his idealist the-
sis on the “ultimate justification” of phenomenology. Ricoeur objects that
Husserl’s idealist version of phenomenological justification is evidentially
weak, that it is nothing more than self–assertion, a style of justification that
“is associated with” the subject–object conceptuality. He draws attention
      Eileen Brennan


to the fact that hermeneutics, by which he means his own philosophy but
also the philosophies of Heidegger and Gadamer, opposes the subject–object
conceptuality by giving priority to the ontological “concept of belonging.”
(Ricoeur : ) Although he does not claim that he has framed “the self ”
in that same hermeneutic conceptuality of belonging, in Oneself as Another,
there may be some justification for claiming that the sense of belonging
to someone (or to some group), suggested by the very construction of
reflexive pronouns like myself or yourself or ourselves, was not lost in the
process of nominalizing those pronouns. However, one thing is certain,
Ricoeur admired Foucault’s sub–title, Care of the Self, and what this shows is
that he believed it was possible to say something intelligible about “the self ”
without having to carve the world up into discrete subjects and objects.


. Linking Oneself as Another to Ricoeur’s earlier works

I should now like to switch perspective and devote some time to considering
the case for viewing Oneself as Another as being continuous with Ricoeur’s
earlier works at least in certain respects. The first piece of evidence that we
need to consider is one provided by Ricoeur himself in the above mentioned
Lectio magistralis. There Ricoeur reports that, after he had completed the
third and final volume of Time and Narrative, he turned his attention to
preparing a series of lectures, which he would revise, expand and rework
several times before publishing them, in , under the title, Soi–même
comme un autre. The English translation, Oneself as Another, would appear
two years later. Ricoeur explains that the motivation for preparing the
original material was an invitation he had received to deliver the Gifford
Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in the winter of . However, that
invitation came with a special request, which left him feeling that the whole
thing was a bit “awkward.” The organizing committee wanted him to “offer
a synthesis of my works,” but to do so would be to go “against the tide of
my known preferences.” ( Jervolino : –) Ricoeur’s handling of this
awkward situation was skilful. He found a way of providing his audience
with a single “set of tools” for understanding his various works while still
managing to introduce a new project. ( Jervolino : ) As he recalls, it
occurred to him that all the questions he had dealt with in the past could be
divided into four groups, corresponding to the four uses that he made of
the modal verb “I can.” He notes that he used the modal verb “I can” in the

    . Ricoeur’s position on the primacy of the concept of belonging is complicated due to a
decision he takes to follow “the long route” to ontology via a series of studies and engagements that
remain on the epistemological level. See Existence and Hermeneutics, in Ricoeur : –.
                                       Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of the Self   


following ways: “I can speak, I can act, I can recount, [and] I can hold myself
responsible for my actions, letting them be attributed to me as their true
author.” ( Jervolino : ) So, the four groups of questions were to be
given the question headings: () “Who speaks?”; () “Who acts?”; () “Who
recounts?”; and () “Who takes responsibility for their actions?” Newly
grouped and re–labelled in that way, Ricoeur hoped that those questions
could then be seen to be linked to one another in certain respects. Of
course, by establishing links among the various questions he effectively
demonstrated the unity and continuity of works that were spread across
the following areas: () the philosophy of language; () the philosophy of
action; () narrative theory; and () moral philosophy. However, he was
not content with merely synthesizing his earlier works; as always, he also
wanted to introduce a new project. But how was he going to do that? He
recalls that it occurred to him that “the multiple questions that I dealt with
in the past could be grouped together around a central question that rises to
the surface in our discourse on the uses that we make of the modal verb
‘I can.’” ( Jervolino : , my emphasis) That central question was the
question, “Who?” It was a question that he was keen to take up and form
into his “new project.”
    The Gifford Lectures were clearly written with a view to highlighting
the unity and continuity of Ricoeur’s philosophical itinerary. However, four
years of substantial revisions and expansions separate those lectures from
the work that would be translated as, Oneself as Another. Charles E. Reagan
considers this to be “time well spent: Oneself as Another is in my opinion
Ricoeur’s most elegantly written, clearly organized, and closely argued
work.” (Cohen and Marsh : ) But my question is: How much of the
original highlighting of unity and continuity survived the changes made?
As discussed in part one, Oneself as Another is designed to part ways with
the philosophies of the subject, switching attention onto “the self;” and
to facilitate that transition Ricoeur plans to stop using the singular subjec-
tive pronoun “I,” replacing it with a nominalized “omnipersonal reflexive
pronoun.” Of course, that means he is no longer in a position to use the
modal verb “I can” to establish links among the questions posed in the
four areas of his work that were mentioned above. So how is the central
question — “Who?” — meant to arise? And what survives, if anything, of
his original list of four peripheral questions? Both answers are to be found
in the introduction. There we see that Ricoeur manages to introduce his
central question by turning to Descartes’ Second Meditation, where he finds
an original question that he will be able to repeat and make his own. Com-
menting on the meaning of Descartes’ original question, he writes: “The
question ‘who?’, related to the question ‘who doubts?’, takes on a new twist
when it is connected to the question ‘who thinks?’ and, more radically, ‘who
     Eileen Brennan


exists?’” (Ricoeur : –) Ricoeur’s repetition of Descartes’ “Who?” will
be related, or connected, to a different set of questions: () “Who speaks?”;
() “Who acts?”; () “Who recounts?”; and () “Who takes responsibility for
their actions?”
    Notwithstanding the evidence of continuity between the Gifford lectures
and Oneself as Another, one could be troubled by the fact that Ricoeur
appears to offer two very different accounts of how the central question
“Who?” arose for him: () it emerged out of Ricoeur’s uses of the modal verb
“I can” (the story Ricoeur tells in his reflections on the Gifford lectures); and
() it is a question that Descartes raised in the Second Meditation and which
Ricoeur intends to raise anew (the story Ricoeur tells in the introduction
to Oneself as Another). But there is no need to be troubled in that regard.
Ricoeur took a critical stance on Descartes’ Second Meditation as far back as
, if not before, and there is some evidence to suggest that that critique
took on a number of different forms down through the years, Ricoeur’s
use of the modal verb “I can” being one of them. So, let me say something
about that now, starting with a few comments on Ricoeur’s early exposure
to a rather unusual critique of Descartes.
    There never was a time when Ricoeur did not want to move beyond
some features of Descartes’ philosophy of the cogito. Roland Dalbiez, the
man who taught him philosophy in his final year at secondary school, was a
huge influence in that regard, as Ricoeur’s contribution to Marguerite Léna’s
Honneur aux maîtres will confirm. Dalbiez was a neo–Scholastic, and as such,
vehemently opposed to philosophical idealism. He was, for Ricoeur, “an
unforgettable teacher,” who taught him about the importance of conceptual
rigour and intellectual courage. ( Jervolino : ) However, as Ricoeur
notes in Honneur aux maîtres, Dalbiez was no ordinary neo–Aristotelian
realist; he had devised a radically new way of critiquing idealist conceptions
of consciousness, based on his own reconstruction of psychoanalysis. Most
unusually, for the time, Dalbiez viewed psychoanalysis as much more than
a therapy; he saw huge potential in the theories of the unconscious, of the
libido, and of neurosis that Freud had developed. Ricoeur and his classmates
were not directly acquainted with that research, but they did encounter it
in the form of Dalbiez’s judgement on the idealists’ decision to prioritize
“a knowledge that is conscious of itself ” over “the real.” Dalbiez described
this “derealisation” as “a mental illness of the psychotic variety.” Ricoeur
says that it was only ten or fifteen years after he left school that he began
to appreciate the extent of his debt to Dalbiez. Commenting specifically
on the impact of Dalbiez’s legacy on Freedom and Nature, he remarks that
whilst certain elements of the book constitute a type of parricide, others pay
tribute, albeit unintentionally, to “Dalbiez’s Freud.” However, he says, it is
probably his own idea of the “absolute involuntary” that is most harmonious
                                                Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of the Self     


with Dalbiez’s “critique of the ‘idealism’ of the Cartesian cogito, which still
resonates in the walls of the (boys’!) Lycée of Rennes.”
    There is no suggestion that Dalbiez encouraged Ricoeur to focus on
Descartes’ Second Meditation. So it is likely that Ricoeur did not come to
critically reflect on aspects of that Meditation until he took on the ardu-
ous task of translating Husserl’s Ideen into French. At that stage he would
have seen that Husserl made no distinction between “consciousness” and
Descartes’ “I think,” understood in a broad sense:

   As starting–point we take consciousness in a pregnant sense which suggests itself at
   once, most simply indicated through the Cartesian cogito, ‘I think.’ As is known
   Descartes understood this in a sense so wide as to include every case of ‘I perceive,
   I remember, I fancy, I judge, feel, desire, will,’ and all experiences of the Ego that
   in any way resemble the foregoing, in all the countless fluctuations of their special
   patterns. (Husserl : )

    It was, of course, in the Second Meditation that Descartes listed the
various modes of the “I think.” Many years later, in the Introduction to
Oneself as Another, Ricoeur would quote the relevant line, noting that it
formed the answer to a very particular question: “What is [a think that
thinks?] A thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, and
which also imagines and senses.” (quoted in Ricoeur : ) He would
then comment that there is “a ‘phenomenologizing’ tendency, expressed
in the enumeration that preserves the real internal variety of the act of
thinking.” (Ricoeur : ) On Ricoeur’s reading, Descartes was not simply
an inspiration for Husserl; he was in fact a proto–phenomenologist.
    Michael Sohn, in The Good of Recognition: Phenomenology, Ethics and Religion
in the Thought of Lévinas and Ricoeur, offers a very insightful account of the
distinctive way in which phenomenologists like Husserl and Levinas understand
Descartes’ cogito. He makes the observation that they share a “broadened
interpretation of the ego cogito,” recognizing multiple modalities, including will,
perception, memory, imagination, judgement, and sensation; and he notes that
Levinas is distinctive in that he “highlights the [important] place of sensation.”
Sohn also suggests that Ricoeur had a preference for “the modality of the will.”
(Sohn : ) I think that this is a very interesting way of looking at a work
like Freedom and Nature, and in a moment I will offer some suggestions of my
own as to why Ricoeur might have chosen that modality of the cogito over
all the others. However, those suggestions will inevitably point to some sharp
differences between Ricoeur and Levinas, the latter who, if Sohn is right, was
not interested in moving beyond Descartes. (Sohn : )

   . Mon premier maître en philosophie, http://www.fondsricoeur.fr/uploads/medias/articles_pr/
mon-premier-maitre.pdf (accessed September , , my translation).
     Eileen Brennan


    As an aspiring phenomenologist in the tradition of Husserlian phe-
nomenology, Ricoeur would have had no option but to take the Cartesian
cogito, or “I think,” as his starting point for a work like Freedom and Nature.
However, because that tradition favoured a broad conception of the ego
cogito he was free to choose the modality of the “I think.” However, there
was no requirement that his motivation for choosing one modality over
another had to be the same as a philosopher like Levinas. As Sohn notes,
Levinas highlighted the modality of sensation because he considered it to
be, “the most primordial and fundamental.” (Sohn : ) Choosing the
“I will” because it served to dramatize problems inherent in Descartes’ con-
ception of the cogito was also an option. There is an intriguing footnote in
John Wall’s Moral Creativity: Paul Ricoeur and the Poetics of Possibility, which
provides an insight into the standard that Ricoeur would have applied to
Descartes’ latent philosophy of the will. Wall notes: “Interestingly, the body
is so central to willing for Ricoeur that he goes so far as to make the rather
strange claim in Freedom and Nature that ‘the acid test of a philosophy of
the will is indisputably the problem of muscular effort’ ().” (Wall :
–) Ricoeur would have seen that because Descartes deliberately sup-
posed throughout the Second Meditation that no bodies exist, including his
own, he was not in a position to do justice to the idea that the will entails
“mastery over a body.” This meant that the only defensible appropriation of
Descartes’ “I will” was in fact a critical one. Of course, being more or less
obliged to effect a critical appropriation of the cogito would have suited
Ricoeur perfectly. It allowed him to position himself within the tradition of
Husserlian phenomenology whilst employing the psychoanalysis–inspired
critique of the cogito that he had inherited from Dalbiez. The record shows
that Ricoeur embraced that opportunity, transforming the Cartesian cogito,
in Freedom and Nature, into a fragile synthesis of the voluntary and the
involuntary (which included the body, character, and the unconscious). And
within a decade he had begun to use the term, “the wounded cogito” to
refer to this subject that posits but does not possess itself.
    There were to be further critical engagements with the Second Medita-
tion. As I mentioned in part one above, from the mid–s onward, Ricoeur
tried to defend the cogito against a threat posed by Freudian psychoanalysis.
However, when he spoke of psychoanalysis putting in check the philosophies
of the cogito, he did not mean that the former offered a potentially more
compelling account of the structure of the subject: id, ego, and super–ego
vs a subject that is fully transparent to itself. After all, his earliest account
of the cogito had managed to reconcile the Cartesian “I will” with the
“absolute involuntary,” which was meant to include the unconscious. The
threat that psychoanalysis posed for the philosophies of the cogito, including
his own, came in the form of an all–encompassing and seemingly never–
                                         Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of the Self   


ending suspicion regarding the reliability of the subject’s claims about itself.
In an effort to defend the cogito from that threat, whilst conceding some
ground to Freud, Ricoeur turned to the complex functioning of language for
guidance. Remarkably, the operations of language led him to broaden the
conception of the cogito beyond the list of modalities found in Descartes’
Second Meditation, and subsequently employed by Husserl, in Ideas, when
he wanted to indicate what he understood by the term, “consciousness.”
The modalities of Ricoeur’s cogito included: “I can speak,” “I can act,” “I
can recount,” “I can hold myself responsible for my actions,” and ultimately
“I can promise” and “I can remember.” Straightaway we see that there are
differences in the grammatical forms employed by Descartes and Ricoeur, a
situation that points to a critical appropriation of some aspect of the Second
Meditation.
    Descartes’ “I think” constitutes a complete thought. The verb conveys
a sense of action but, for Descartes at least, there is also information to be
gleaned about the state of the subject: “I am a thing that thinks.” Ricoeur’s
“I can” bears some resemblance to Descartes’ “I think,” but his two–word
claim does not form a complete thought. Further, the modal verb “I can”
conveys a sense of ability or capacity as opposed to a sense of action. Ricoeur
offers an explanation, in Oneself as Another, as to why he is no longer pre-
pared to use the two–word statement, “I think.” He says that Descartes’
enumeration of mental acts, in the Second Meditation “poses the question
of the identity of the subject, but in a sense entirely different from the nar-
rative identity of a concrete person.” (Ricoeur : ) He feels that however
welcome the diversity of the operations of Descartes’ subject may be, it
“can involve nothing but a pointlike ahistorical identity. . . since the cogito
is instantaneous.” (Ricoeur : ) Of course, Husserl’s phenomenological
description of the “I think,” which as we have seen stays close to the Second
Meditation, does not restrict the sense of the identity of consciousness in
quite the same way. What seems to be missing in Ricoeur’s explanation,
then, is a clear statement on his dissatisfaction with Descartes’ inattention
to abilities or capacities. However, we will have to look elsewhere if we are
to appreciate the extent to which Ricoeur’s use of the modal verb “I can”
represents a critique of Descartes’ “I think.”
    It seems to me that a fuller explanation for Ricoeur’s decision to jettison
Descartes’ “I think,” (and Husserl’s concomitant acts of consciousness) ini-
tially in favour of the modal verb “I can,” can be constructed on the basis of
the critique of Husserlian idealism that Ricoeur proposes in Phenomenology
and Hermeneutics. Let us take just one idealist thesis by way of example: the
ultimately self–responsible thesis. According to Ricoeur, that thesis holds that
the subject is “sovereign,” that it is “master of itself;” the only responsibility
it has is to itself. (Ricoeur : ) But hermeneutics is deeply suspicious
       Eileen Brennan


of this “Cartesian” claim of ultimate self–responsibility; and to expose the
pretensions of the idealist cogito, it makes the counter–claim that the genuine
subject is the one that “responds to the matter of the text, and hence to the
proposals of meaning the text unfolds.” (Ricoeur : ) As Ricoeur remarks,
“Hermeneutics proposes to make subjectivity the final, and not the first, cate-
gory of a theory of understanding. Subjectivity must be lost as radical origin if
it is to be recovered in a more modest role.” (Ricoeur : ) To this, we can
add that once it is recovered in a more modest role, the subject will be seen to
have a more modest tone. It will no longer triumphantly assert “I think,” but
will adopt a tone of conviction and earnestness: “I believe I can.”
     To return briefly to what Ricoeur says about his relationship to Descartes
in the introduction to Oneself as Another, it is worth noting that having sig-
nalled that he plans to take up Descartes’ question — “Who?” — and make
it his own, he makes it clear that the answer he intends to give to that
question is “the speaker, agent, character of narration, subject of moral
imputation, and so forth.” (Ricoeur : ) However, he insists that this
speaker or agent, etc. will not have the same status as the “meditating sub-
ject” at “the end of [Descartes’] Second Meditation.” (Ricoeur : ) As
already noted, at that point in the Meditations the “meditating subject” is
described as follows: “A thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies,
wills, refuses, and which also imagines and senses.” (quoted in Ricoeur :
) This important statement on a difference in status between Ricoeur’s
notion of “the self ” and Descartes notion of the “I” of the “I think” under-
scores a feature of Ricoeur’s long–standing critical engagement with the
Second Meditation: this guiding thread is, in every instance, the occasion
for innovation on Ricoeur’s part. From it emerged: the fragile synthesis of
the voluntary and involuntary; the “wounded cogito;” and a cogito that
expresses itself using the modal verb “I can.” However, the upshot of the
most recent critical engagement with Descartes is more revolution than
innovation. It is the occasion for introducing something that “appears to
have nothing in common with” Descartes’ “meditating subject,” namely,
“the self.” (Ricoeur : )


. Conflicting interpretations of Oneself as Another

Domenico Jervolino in Paul Ricoeur: Une herméneutique de la condition hu-
maine focuses attention on some of the statements from the introduction
to Oneself as Another that I discussed in part one above, including Ricoeur’s
reference to the opposition between “self ” and “I.” But, on his reading, it is

     . The latter is the formula that Ricoeur uses in The Course of Recognition (A and P : ).
                                         Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of the Self   


not the introduction of a new topic that separates Oneself as Another from
the works that precede it, but the search for a form of language that is better
adapted to talking about “the subject.” Jervolino suggests that Ricoeur’s
earlier works may have used a type of language that led his readers to view
the subject in a “subjectivist way,” and acutely conscious of that danger, in
Oneself as Another, Ricoeur went in search of a more appropriate form of
expression for talking about beings like us. Jervolino writes: “The question
of the subject, one of the guiding threads for all of Ricoeur’s research, ap-
peared in Oneself as Another in all its complexity as a radical re–examination
of the subject and the exploration of various, non–subjectivist conventions
for speaking about this being oneself (cet être soi–même) that we are, through
what the author calls ‘a hermeneutic phenomenology of the self.’” ( Jer-
volino : , my translation) The first thing to note is that Jervolino
does not give equal consideration here to () the unity and continuity of
Ricoeur’s works and () the emergence of a new project in Oneself as Another.
His thought is that Ricoeur’s entire work is focused on the same question:
the question of the subject. For him, Oneself as Another is just the most
radical form of that questioning to date in that it raises concerns about
the unintended consequences of Ricoeur’s use of the language of modern
epistemology: encouraging a subjectivist view of the subject, that is one
where the mind generates knowledge without reference to reality.
    There is no denying that Jervolino’s interpretation can accommodate
most of the statements made in the introduction. However, it has to sidestep
one or two of the more dramatic claims underscored in part one above, for
example, Ricoeur’s stated ambition to reach a point where “our problematic
will have parted ways with the philosophies of the subject.” (Ricoeur :
) Further, Jervolino’s suggestion that, prior to the mid–s, Ricoeur’s
use of language risked promoting a subjectivist conception of the subject is
not borne out by the research presented in parts one and two above. As I
have already noted, Ricoeur’s appropriation of the cogito or “I think” was
always critical, and indeed always linguistically inventive. He spoke about
an exploding cogito and a “wounded cogito.” Further, it was always a cogito
that was embodied, had its own character, and involved an unconscious,
which meant it was capable of positing itself but was not in possession of itself.
As such, Ricoeur’s description of the cogito was possibly the furthest one
could get from a subjectivist interpretation without having to jettison the
subject altogether.
    Johann Michel, in Paul Ricoeur: une philosophie de l’agir humain, is similar
to Jervolino in that he reads Ricoeur’s text closely, notes the various state-
ments on a planned break with the use of terms like “I,” yet still maintains
that the topic discussed in Oneself as Another is nothing new; it is still “the
subject.” He concedes that the work represents some kind of break with the
    Eileen Brennan


works that preceded it, but he warns against lending too much importance
to “a break that is excessively abrupt and unfamiliar in Ricoeur’s teaching
style.” (Michel : , my translation) Of course, those claims regarding a
dramatic break with the philosophies of the subject are claims that Ricoeur
himself makes in the Introduction. What Michel appears to be saying is
that those claims are not sufficiently “Ricoeurian,” that Ricoeur is not being
true to his own pedagogy, which is known to be much more dialectical.
Encouraged not only by the use of the term “other” in the title of the
work but also by the third intention that, according to Ricoeur, influenced
the preparation of the book, Michel focuses attention on what he terms,
the “intersubjective system of reference” that Ricoeur introduces in Oneself
as Another. He claims that up until the publication of that work Ricoeur’s
anthropology was one that related to “a subject,” without being either ego-
centric or solipsistic; yet it was problematical in that it accorded priority to
the “care of the self,” that is, it was very much a case of a self in search of
itself. (Michel : –) Michel suggests that Oneself as Another represents
“a major event” in Ricoeur’s “anthropological itinerary” (Michel : )
because it provides a new and very different path to understanding the self:
the “detour through the philosophy of intersubjectivity.” (Michel : )
    The term “intersubjectivity” is associated with, among other things, the
type of epistemology that we find in Husserl’s works. However, Michel
suggests that there is a significant “bifurcation” in the way Husserl and
Ricoeur — two proponents of Husserlian phenomenology — employ, or
allude to, the notion of intersubjectivity. (Michel : ) As is well known,
intersubjectivity is one of the problems that Husserl addresses in his phe-
nomenological epistemology, but, on Michel’s reading, the “turning point
of intersubjectivity,” in Ricoeur, is really a turn towards the realm of “the
interhuman.” (Michel : ) Michel is, of course, perfectly right to asso-
ciate Ricoeur with Husserl. As I noted in part one above, Ricoeur claimed
to belong to the tradition of Husserlian phenomenology. However, as I also
mentioned in a footnote to part one, Ricoeur made an early statement, in
The Conflict of Interpretations, regarding his intention to journey towards a
phenomenological ontology that would link his work to that of Heidegger
and Gadamer. The problem with Michel’s talk of the “turning point of
intersubjectivity,” as I see it, is that it does not capture the sense that we
have, in reading Oneself as Another, that Ricoeur is finally taking up a posi-
tion that will allow him to give the long anticipated answer to the question
What Ontology in View? (the title of the tenth study). It is simply impossible
to get from the epistemological conceptuality of intersubjectivity to the
ontological conceptuality of belonging in one small step.
    In contrast, Jean Greisch, in Paul Ricoeur: L’itinérance du sens, takes Ri-
coeur at his word and accepts that he is trying to work out “a hermeneutics
                                        Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of the Self   


of the self,” in Oneself as Another, which would represent something very dif-
ferent from the well–known philosophies of the subject. Focusing attention
on a statement that Ricoeur makes about the position that his hermeneutics
of the self is to occupy (or to use Ricoeur’s term, the status it is to have)
relative to the philosophies of the subject, Greisch notes: “Conscious of the
amazing variations that these philosophies present, torn between the Carte-
sian cogito with its foundational ambition (the ‘exalted subject’) and the
Nietzschean anti–cogito (the ‘humiliated subject’), Ricoeur’s hermeneutics
‘is placed at an equal distance from the apology of the cogito and from its
overthrow’ [Ricoeur : ].” (Greisch : ) As Greisch understands
it, Ricoeur’s phrase, “equal distance” is not meant to signify some pusil-
lanimous compromise between extremes. Rather, it is meant to signify a
position that lies beyond, or surpasses, the alternatives: Cartesian cogito or
Nietzschean anti–cogito.
    Greisch discovers a great deal about the relative position of “the hermeneu-
tics of the self ” by following a clue that Ricoeur provides in a footnote to the
ninth study: “attestation” is “the password for this entire book.” (Ricoeur
: ) Again, taking Ricoeur at his word and putting that “password”
to use (Greisch : ) he learns that this new hermeneutic space has a
particular epistemic quality and involves certain ontological commitments. With
regard its epistemic quality, Greisch notes that Ricoeur’s “hermeneutics of
the self ” does not have the apodictic certainty that Descartes and Husserl
were looking for, but it has a degree of certainty nonetheless: “alethic”
certainty. (Greisch : ) As Greisch explains, it calls on a notion that
the classic opposition doxa/episteme simply does not capture: “believing in”
(croyance). “Believing in” means “credence” (créance); it is a matter of having
“confidence” (confiance) and facing up to (Freudian and indeed Nietzschean)
“suspicion.” (Greisch : ) Greisch quotes a line from the introduction
to Oneself as Another: “‘As credence without any guarantee, but also as trust
greater than any suspicion,’ [Ricoeur : ] the hermeneutics of the self
stands at an equal distance from Descartes’ exalted cogito and the cogito
that is declaimed deposed by Nietzsche.” (Greisch : ) However, epis-
temic quality is not the only thing that separates the “hermeneutics of the
self ” from “the philosophies of the subject.” The two philosophies also have
very different ontological commitments.
    Greisch points out that, taken together, the first nine studies of Oneself
as Another offer a comprehensive exploration of the epistemic quality of
attestation. However, it is only in the Tenth Study that Ricoeur turns to
consider the ontological commitments of attestation. Even then, he notes,
Ricoeur’s ontology is, as it always has been, more a “promised land” than
a land that he has conquered. (Greisch : ) As Greisch understands
them, the ontological commitments of Ricoeurian attestation are not truth
     Eileen Brennan


conditions in the sense of entities and properties of entities that we might
list. Rather, they “send us back to a very complex ontological inquiry,”
which includes the reinterpretation of Aristotle through Heidegger, but
also an appropriation of Spinoza’s conatus and a critical engagement with
Levinas. (Greisch : ) Greisch notes that Ricoeur borrows the idea of
ontological commitments from W.V.O. Quine, but he does not discuss the
original meaning of the expression “ontological commitments,” presum-
ably because Ricoeur does not strictly adhere to Quine’s definition. Yet, it
can be instructive to observe the way that expression undergoes some kind
of transformation in Ricoeur’s discussion on attestation.
    According to Quine, ontological commitments are the truth conditions
for a theory or discourse. That is to say, they are the entities or kinds of enti-
ties that must exist in order for the theory to be true. So, to take Descartes’
philosophy of the subject as an example, its ontological commitments are
that an immaterial substance exists, which has properties that include the
following: “thinking about Vienna” and “being free from pain.” (Van Inwa-
gen : ) But what entities need to exist in order for the “hermeneutics
of the self ” to be true? In the tenth study, Ricoeur explains that he stands
opposed to the “substantialism of the tradition (to which Kant continues to
belong from the perspective of the first analogy of experience),” though not
to the “Aristotelian ousia, which cannot be reduced to the former.” (Ricoeur
: ) He talks about reinterpreting the whole of Aristotle’s Metaphysics,
with a particular emphasis on the notions of dunamis (potentiality) and
energeia (actuality), the objective being to articulate the ontological commit-
ments of the attestation of “existing in the mode of selfhood.” (Ricoeur :
) He readily accepts that a comparison can be made between his “effort
of reconstruction and the efforts of those who claim to follow the Heideg-
ger of the gestation period of Being and Time” and he proposes to indicate
“the slight difference that remains between my attempt at reconstructing
energeia–dunamis and the reconstruction inspired by Heidegger.” (Ricoeur
: ) But this vast project of appropriating Aristotle’s ontology through
Heidegger will surely see truth conditions re–cast as human actions where
before they were entities. The demands that Ricoeurian attestation places
on the world are not that certain entities or kinds of entities exist (as in
Quine), but that certain actions or kinds of actions can be performed.
    Greisch’s very helpful account of the position of the “hermeneutics of
the self ” relative to the two opposing strands of the philosophies of the
cogito provides an insight into, what I referred to in part two above, as the
revolution in Ricoeur’s thought that occurred in his most recent critical

     . Ontological Commitment, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ontological-commitment/ (ac-
cessed September , ).
                                            Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of the Self   


engagement with Descartes’ Second Meditation. We can now say that that
revolution took Ricoeur’s reflections from the plane of epistemological
inquiry, with its search for apodictic certainty and its substance ontology, to
a new vantage point — the space of attestation — where the only certainty
is alethic certainty and the ontological commitments are close to, but
not identical with those of Heidegger. As I noted in part one above, this
moment of rapprochement with Heidegger was one that Ricoeur had been
anticipating for very many years.


. Concluding remarks

I mentioned at the outset that the introduction to Oneself as Another includes
three considerations that challenge the commonly held assumption that,
for Ricoeur, “the self ” and “the subject” are one and the same: () a plan to
use a nominalized omnipersonal reflexive pronoun in place of the singular
subjective pronoun or “I;” () a declaration of Ricoeur’s intention to break
with, or part ways with the “philosophies of the subject;” and () an im-
portant indication that the “hermeneutics of the self ” will have a different
status to that of the “philosophies of the subject.” Having discussed all three
considerations in some detail, I believe that it is Ricoeur’s reflection on
attestation that presents the strongest challenge to any attempt to equate
“the subject” and “the self.” It obliges us to move beyond the comfortable
terrain of a discourse on the subject to the unfamiliar space of attestation
where “selfhood” no longer means the quality that constitutes one’s indi-
viduality, but a mode of existing (Ricoeur : ) which is reminiscent of
Heidegger’s Being–in–the–world. As Ricoeur remarks: “It remains that the
concept — if we can still speak in these terms — of being–in–the–world is
expressed in numerous ways, and that it is together that oneself, care, and
being–in–the–world are to be determined.” (Ricoeur : )


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     Eileen Brennan


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