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PHILOSOPHY BRIDGING TWO PHILOSOPHIES: RICOEUR'S INTERPRETATION OF KANTAlison Scott Baumann, Gloucester University, on 3 February '04 What can we know? What ought I to do? What can I reasonably hope for? Ricoeur believes that these three questions posed by Kant constitute a unique pattern and a structure in which the parts are inseparable. Kant, renowned for his belief in the truth-constituting power of reason, transformed the debates in European philosophy about epistemology. Ownership of Kant’s work is claimed by many different groups, often either in order to adulate or vilify, and usually in order to align his writings with their own work, either in a positive or a negative manner. Ricoeur, as a phenomenologist and hermeneuticist, believes that he brings a more hermeneutical interpretation to Kant’s work than rationalist analytic philosophers do. I wish to discuss whether we see, through Ricoeur, a different Kant or simply different aspects of the same, recognisable, philosopher? Do we, in looking at Kant through Ricoeur’s eyes, find a different way of formulating our ideas about Kant or an unreasonable distortion of the same? To clarify this debate, I will look at two different views of Kant; that held by Norris, critical realist who sees Kant as a great truth seeker and that of Ricoeur, hermeneuticist who sees Kant as profoundly moral. For both Norris and Ricoeur, Kant failed to resolve issues about God, but they have very different reasons for this conclusion.. Norris sets the scene
Norris, critical realist and astute commentator on Kant and on the vagaries of Kant’s reception, has the depth of understanding of many schools of thought to provide us with an overview. He contextualises Kant within a much misunderstood tradition of philosophy that seeks truth through using reason. Norris emphasises the importance of establishing a relation between belief, ideology and Kantian practical reason. He sees the importance of the relationship between phenomenal understanding and practical, noumenal reason. These two forms of reason can become polarised, with cognitive understanding and the determinate powers and limits of reason on the one hand. On the other hand we have the exercise of moral will and reflective judgement’s difficulties with practical reason. For Norris there is an extremism strongly visible in much postmodern philosophy that seeks to sunder this relationship: the legacy of Cartesian thought can lead to naïve, subject centred foundationalism, that lends mythical status to the ideal, unmediated self-presence. This exaggerates and distorts the debate about reason and the need for rational thought. At the other extreme, we have the unhelpful recourse to post-structuralist determinism, in which subjectivity is seen as constituted in and by language. Our use of language is renowned for its dependence on situational meaning. All can thus become relative, dependent on context and leading to such positions as Barthes’ ‘death of the author’. So there is no subject left there at all. Norris regrets this polarisation that he sees as a trivialisation by modern and postmodern philosophers of Kant’s belief in the power of the mind to grapple with the relationship between pure and practical reason. He admires Kant, as a great thinker who sought to problematise and resolve to fundamental problems, yet establishes parameters and attempts to use the tension between the two, so that the transcendental subject can develop both theories and practices by which to live our lives. We should take nothing on faith with regard to consensus beliefs and must read and think critically about our beliefs, their origins and their consequences. What can I know? What can I know by the evidence of my senses, and what must I put my faith in , with no evidence except hopefulness? With regard to the sort of phenomenon that truth is, in the nature of such democratic debate, Kant sees the strict impossibility that reason could provide the ultimate self-justifying grounds for its own legislative truth claims. There will be a judgement, a leap of faith necessary to encompass that which we cannot prove; the force that is metaphysical, transcendental, supersensible, sublime. Thus the transcendental claim, in its technical, Kantian sense, has two meanings. One meaning of transcendental is that it is predicable of all categories, i.e. with conditions of possibility that could cover all cases. The other meaning of transcendental is that which is presupposed by any act of judgement. There is thus an almost intolerable tension between reason’s inability to legislate single-handedly for truth claims, and the impossibility of anything else performing that function except the sublime. If the sublime embodies a claim to knowledge that transcends all the limits of reason, this is the position of religion in Kant’s conceptual world. Yet this creates difficulties for Kant which Ricoeur sympathises with, as we shall see later. Moreover, there is a trend discernible in some postmodern philosophies that Norris sees as a mis-appropriation of the idea of transcendent truths: Lyotard distorting the idea of the sublime into that of heterogeneity, i.e. all phenomena have similar valence, regardless of provenance or intent. This approach allows language codes, speech act genres and ethical codes, for example, to be indistinguishable from each other in value. Another problem for Kant is the issue of implementation of truth; how do we pass from an ‘is’ to an ‘ought’? How do principles translate into lower order maxims of practical reason? How do these maxims make use of circumstantial evidence while also remaining true to the original principle that guided them? Kant hopes for a ‘parliament’ of intersubjective reason, dialogue and critique and in this sense Norris sees Derrida as profoundly Kantian. Norris also sees Kant as very important to the modern philosophical scene, and is astounded at the way in which postmodern philosophers like Lyotard decry and distort Kant’s interest in clear, rational thought combined with principled action. Norris emphasises the rational in Kant, and regrets the way in which Kant seems to have found it impossible to define the spiritual, the metaphysical elements of the human existence within a rationalist frame. By arguing that the existence of God must simply be accepted, presupposed as a given, a regulative idea, Kant could be seen to be presenting a rather grudging view of religion as a necessary yet not sufficient factor in developing a moral sensibility. Moral experience, rather than dogmatic metaphysics, according to Coplestone, is, for Kant, the key to a supersensible sphere. For Kant, it can be argued that nothing will really make any kind of moral sense were it not for faith in God, eternal life and judgement. This position is unsatisfactory if, like Norris, you wish to find intellectual positions that seek evidential bases. This aspect of Kant’s philosophy exasperates Ricoeur too, but for a different reason. Ricoeur espouses a different tradition, stemming from phenomenology and hermeneutics and looking at language in a way that can lead him to be bracketed, misleadingly, with other continentals for whom narrative has become a postmodern vehicle for relativism. Ricoeur attempts to see Kant more as a hermeneuticist would, i.e. more provisional and struggling to tolerate intolerable uncertainties. Ricoeur focuses more on affect than Norris does, and believes that Kant misunderstood, the otherness of our subjective will, the alterity in conscience, by denying the mytho-poetic aspects of faith. What ought I to do? Obligation, the categorical Imperative and its requirement to ‘do as you would be done by’, dominate Kant’s thinking. Ricoeur sees the influence of Aristotle in Kant’s moral philosophy, which attempts to crystallise morality as a fact of human existence, rather than to see it as needing to be invented. Kant’s moral philosophy does not come from nothing: moral good is good without qualification, and that which is good, becomes the will. All genuinely virtuous acts proceed from goodness of will. Desire is recognised through its aim, will is recognised through its relation to the law. The will is practical reason, common in principle to all rational beings. The normative idea of the good without restriction encompasses two vast areas. There is the area of personal praxis (developed in the Groundwork and the Critique of Practical Reason). There is the juxtaposed area of public praxis (dealt with in the part of the Metaphysics of Morals that is devoted to the Metaphysical Elements of Justice). The notion of good will becomes synonymous with the notion of action done out of duty, because a good will without qualification is a will that is constitutionally subject to limitations. These are universals that are characterised by a sense of constraint and of duty. Universality and constraint are difficult to identify because of the finite constitution of the will. Moreover the antagonism between reason and desire can only be resolved by setting aside inclination, whose empirical status would disqualify it from consideration by a universal principle. Indeed, desires and inclinations are ‘pathological’, in Kant’s ultra-rigorist, Pietistic view. The key question is whether the maxims that I use to guide my actions are universalisable? Attached to that question is the issue about whether the morality of obligation opposes the ethics of the good life. In what can become a struggle between the moral norm and ethical aim, the same person (each of us) becomes the battleground, in Kant, for the power to command and then to obey or disobey. Inclination shows up through its passivity, sensing desire to be pathological. Did Kant regard desire as antagonistic to rationality? Ricoeur chooses to defend this position of Kant ‘up to a certain point’, by reminding us that Kant differentiated between the categorical imperative and the imperatives that are simply hypothetical, involving skill and prudence. The categorical imperative passes the test of universalisation, and thus denies the other imperatives their motivation to be imperative. They become subjective, poor things, traced back to the faculty of desiring. If this is so, it seems to render the human condition lacking in hope. The person is perhaps the locus of most difference between Kant and Ricoeur. For Kant, as well as for Locke and Hume, identity results from a comparison and substance is the first category of relation in this process. Thus it is legitimate to find criteria in their work for sameness, but not necessarily for selfhood. Ricoeur sees a criterion as that which allows us to distinguish the true from the false in competing truth claims. He doubts whether selfhood and sameness lend themselves in the same way to the test of truth claims, because the individual person is responsible for characterising their own identity. If my body belongs to myself, this relationship between body and self may not be within the order of a process of truth claiming criteriology, but more within the province of attestation, the ‘here I stand’ of self-belief and self doubt. Hume saw identity as something and also as nothing ‘but a datum stripped of selfhood’ and yet as Chisholm pointed out, someone is stumbling around sensing these perceptions. For a visible manifestation of identity, Rembrandt’s self-portraits provide clear evidence for Ricoeur that selfhood is not essentially sameness, it is that the body belongs to someone ‘capable of designating himself or herself as the one whose body this is’. Our self-portrait is usually not visible of course, and so Ricoeur has endeavoured to develop, over a working life of more than fifty years, the sense of selfhood as essentially narrative and ethical. In an early work, Fallible Man, Ricoeur saw existential fault as the middle term between finite and infinite as opposing tensions. In this later work, Oneself As Another, he sees narrative as performing that function. He finds Aristotle’s work on praxis both inspirational because of its ethical nature (seeking the Good Life), yet also limited because Aristotle had no developed a sense of the self or a unified concept of the will, such as we find now in Augustine, Descartes and the Cartesians, Kant and Hegel. Ricoeur believes that Kant’s work in The Dialectic of Pure Will opens up a new ‘workplace’ with the theme of the highest good. This seems Aristotelian, with ‘the entire and perfect good as the object of the faculty of desire of rational finite beings’. Yet Ricoeur points out that this work is in fact not Aristotelian, building as it does on the Analytic of Kant, because ‘it is only for an autonomous will that the career is opened for this new problematic of the highest good and of happiness’. This may sound Aristotelian, but in order to be so, it would need to have a teleology of ethical action that encompasses dynamism and aim as seen in mimesis and plot. Ricoeur believes that Kant’s thought remains deontological, with the formalism of morality preventing Kant from posing the problem of the sovereign good in terms of dynamism and aim. Thus, for Kant, the tension between universalisation and particularity is played out within the individual. On this reading, the dynamic relationship between individuals (the interplay, interaction and intersubjectivity that helps us to see ourselves in others) that Ricoeur finds so vital, is not integral to Kant’s work. What can I reasonably hope? Kant believed that we construe the world by our perceptions of it. Yet things do also exist, independently of us. We cannot see things as they really are, only as distorted by our conceptualisation of them. Kant also concedes the existence of areas that are dependent for their validation upon assertions of faith. Such areas cannot be empirically proven, yet the existence of God is presupposed, accepted by Kant as a given. This is not an easy position to be in, as Coplestone discussed. Coplestone wrote that ‘recognition of the fact of moral obligation is seen to demand or postulate a practical faith in these truths.’ My italics indicate my interest in Coplestone’s phrasing, that seems to reflect Kant’s own difficulties with the relationship between the moral and religious approach and the scientific intellect. Kant was deeply concerned to avoid going back into what Coplestone called the ‘vanity of dogmatic metaphysics’. He risked the integrity of his work in his attempts to show that the mind can make a rational transition when passing from the mechanistic world of nature to the faith-based world of morality. In trying to argue that the two worlds of the sensible and the supersensible can be bridged, Kant seems to ask us to put our faith in a sort of metaphysical bridge, which is difficult to countenance if presented as a given, born of rational argument. Ricoeur’s life has been dedicated to achieving some congruence between reason and affect, between rationalist analytic and continental philosophy, and he strives to reconcile these two ways of thinking. For Ricoeur, Kant is impressive in attempting to establish a mutual fit between another polarised and problematic relationship, that between philosophy and religion. Ricoeur writes in some detail about Kant’s essay Religion within The Limits of Reason Alone, in a paper called A Philosophical Hermeneutics of Religion: Kant. Taking Kant’s text as a philosophical hermeneutics of religion means that Ricoeur finds it impressive as an attempted philosophical justification of hope. This attempt is, however, flawed precisely because of its insistence on finding a philosophical and not a spiritual solution to evil. Ricoeur feels that Kant concedes the element of otherness, the alterity that resides at the core of religion; the tensions between conscience and the will, between good and evil, between faith and reason. However, a concession to a phenomenon is less than an embracing of it, and Ricoeur senses that Kant seeks to keep the debate at the level of moral improvement, rather than taking the risk in going for a greater challenge, the belief that hope can come out of these contradictions as a possibility as well as a solution. For Ricoeur it is Kant’s denial of the mytho-poetic function of the imagination that deprives the latter of some kind of spiritual resolution. For Norris Kant’s fideist approach to religious methods is the weakest part of his philosophy. For Ricoeur, Kant failed to reconcile philosophy and religion because he insisted on seeking to unite religion and philosophy at the frontier of reason, a place where the rationalist side of the argument is more strongly represented. Moreover, Kant became trapped in his argument about the institutionalisation of faith, which he believed led to the falsification of belief. The tension in reconciling objective knowledge with subjective understanding is insurmountable for Ricoeur, with his belief that we can never fully reconcile all the layers of meaning that we and others create. Yet Ricoeur’s profound religious faith (Protestant) and his acceptance of surplus of meaning and provisionality of truths, makes the plurality more bearable than it is for Kant, with his Categorical Imperative that resembles a deontological, a duty-based interpretation of justice. For Kant, religion poses more problems than it can resolve, because he sees its necessary service to humans, yet is sceptical of its abuses of power. For Ricoeur, religion has of course been misused, abused and misappropriated for power, yet he is more interested in the ethical energy that spiritual beliefs can generate, giving hope of resurrection and hope of a new life. Kant and Ricoeur move apart with regard to spirituality. Kant attempts to move away from religion. He attempts to give dominance to his realist side, sceptical of that most delicate manifestation of transcendental idealism, although he is also an idealist. Ricoeur moves firmly within a spirituality that also embraces church, convinced as he is of the essentially human spirituality that shows itself in conscience, in struggles between good and evil, fallibility and law, the finite and the infinite. Maxims, of which the Golden Rule is the ultimate, are Kant’s solution. Narratives as ethical ontologies are Ricoeur’s solution. Yet Ricoeur remains a Kantian in much of his thinking and he sees in Kant, despite all the difficulties, a hopefulness that there can be a better life. It is important to remember that Ricoeur, in attributing this hope to Kant, differentiates between Kant’s critical philosophy and his writings on religion. In the former Ricoeur sees acceptance of God, and God as the originator of freedom of the will, whereas in the latter Kant criticises religion as the source of conflict for the autonomous will. There is a typically Ricoeurian paradox here, as Ricoeur believes that issues to do with faith cannot be satisfactorily dealt with by philosophy, so Kant is bound to fail and yet he is to be admired for making the attempt. Thus Ricoeur finds in Kant a structure of thought that can engender hope and survive our knowledge of profound, insoluble problems. The manner in which Kant grapples with difficulties is of great interest to Ricoeur, because it involves commitment to the possibility of better understanding, through use of reason as an exploratory, conjectural approach. For Ricoeur, Kant’s optimism at the level of theorising about political action is compatible with his radical pessimism at the level of ethical life. In Kant’s work on the theory of law, Ricoeur sees the only occasion on which the transcendental and the empirical are actually integrated. The conditions for the functioning of society are defined by conflict, by ‘unsocial sociability’ (Kant’s expression) and the distinction between ‘mine’ and ‘yours’ must be established within the law. Ricoeur sees this as the huge difficulty that Kant worked at; how can we contextualise the universal while keeping it as a regulative idea? This doubt, tension and yet insistence on possibilities in his work makes Kant more admirable for Ricoeur than Hegel, whose vision is of negations and contradictions that will always be resolvable and lead to completion. Ricoeur may thus be positioned as a post-Hegelian Kantian, one who sees Kant through modern eyes, and also commands deep knowledge of many of Kant’s sources. For Norris, Kant’s work was devoted to and ultimately flawed by, the deeply troublesome question about different types of beliefs. As a realist Kant believed that there are objects out there in the world, the noumenal. As a transcendental idealist he saw cognitive processes as innate, a priori capacities, intuitive and leading to proof of concepts, the phenomenal. Kant hoped this was an answer to Hume, whose work had famously roused him from his dogmatic slumbers, yet Norris believes that it raised even bigger problems about this huge subject(ive)/ object(ive) question, at least partly because of Kant’s positioning of God at the heart of the human experience, yet in a way that is rational and therefore perhaps contradictory to the idea of faith as a supersensible, irrational phenomenon. Thus, for Norris, Kant failed in his attempt to ‘square the circle’. Norris and Ricoeur both see this failure, yet for very different reasons. For Norris the difficulty lies with Kant’s failure as both realist and transcendental idealist to answer the question above: how can we defend objective truth and also defend the view that we can have knowledge of these objective truths, given that we are limited by our conceptual capacities? For Ricoeur the difficulty lies with Kant’s rationalisation of the human will, that for Ricoeur is a fallible will, yet aware that it is capable of improving, and also intersubjective in essence. Yet it is the spectacularly thorough and balanced way in which Kant enumerates his difficulties that provides Ricoeur with some hope for future resolution, as well as Kant’s visionary sensibility. As an indication of his commitment to much of Kant’s work, Ricoeur gives an example in Critique and Conviction of a universal idea in a regulative sense. It is known to us all, from the essay Perpetual Peace, in which Kant develops the idea of universal hospitality. Ricoeur finds this both realistic and idealistic, a Copernican-type argument that recognises our existence in a finite world, as well as our imperative duty to each other. Ricoeur comments that this work shows that Kant was ‘imbued with biblical culture’. For Ricoeur, the intensity of an experience such as the birth of a child, accepting a gift, the happiness of shared friendship, are experiences that are to be understood as out-of-time, or more-than-time and he sees this in Kant with his simple imaginary. Ricoeur sees Kant as attempting to understand this paradox of empathy and selfhood, despite Kant’s assertions that ultimately, reason and understanding will determine the human. Putting faith in reason and understanding represents a commitment to another set of metaphysical ideas, very different in intent from spiritual faith, yet no less a set of beliefs that are verification-transcendent, that go beyond the possibility of proof. This is a source of less discomfort for Ricoeur than it was for Kant. Ricoeur believes that he sees a more conciliatory Kant than often understood by rationalist philosophy. Ricoeur has more faith in the metaphysical bridge that Kant labours to construct for us. Perhaps Ricoeur sees more of this connection even than Kant himself, who seems to have felt that this ‘bridge’ was necessary yet not safe to use. Ricoeur recommends using our judgement about the structural defects in the argument that spans rationalist and faith–based thinking, in order to ditch that connection but then suspend our critical faculties and make a leap of faith anyway. For Ricoeur this dangerous need to ‘jump’ is what gives us our love for others and our vitality of thought, based on a sense of hope that rationalists would regard as unfounded and even suicidal. Much of his work is devoted to a hermeneutic philosophy that develops an ‘ontology of hope’ to attempt to span, imperfectly, the chasm between our fears and our hopes, between real and ideal, finite and infinite, particular and universal, practical and pure, subjective and objective, reason and the sublime. i Norris, 1996 Reclaiming Truth (29-49) London: Lawrence and Wishart. ii Ricoeur, P. (1981) Hermeneutics of the Human Sciences p.92 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press iii Coplestone, F 1964 A History of Philosophy, Vol 6 (1) New York: Doubleday iv Ricoeur, 1992, Oneself As Another Chicago: Chicago University Press p.207 v ibid, p.129 vi Ricoeur, 1986 Fallible Man New York: Fordham Press vii ibid, p. 120 n5 viii ibid, p. 89 ix ibid, p. 212n18 x ibid, p.212 xi Coplestone, p.239-40 xii Ricoeur, 1995 Figuring The Sacred Minneapolis: Fortress Press xiii ibid p.87 xiv Ricoeur, 1998 Critique and Conviction Cambridge: Polity p. 66 xv ibid, p.157 Alison Scott Baumann |
