The Culture of Recognition: Another Reading of Paul Ricoeur's Work

552 Pages·2014·3.73 MB·English

The Culture of Recognition: Another
Reading of Paul Ricoeur's Work
Author: Timo Sakari Helenius
Persistent link: http://hdl.handle.net/2345/3298
This work is posted on eScholarship@BC,
Boston College University Libraries.
Boston College Electronic Thesis or Dissertation, 2013
Copyright is held by the author, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted.
Boston College

The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Department of Philosophy

THE CULTURE OF RECOGNITION:

ANOTHER READING OF PAUL RICOEUR’S WORK

a dissertation

by

TIMO HELENIUS

submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

December 2013
© copyright by TIMO HELENIUS
2013
THE CULTURE OF RECOGNITION: ANOTHER READING OF PAUL RICOEUR’S WORK

Timo Helenius

Advisor: Professor Richard Kearney

ABSTRACT

This dissertation work examines culture as a condition, as a context, and, finally, as an achievement.
The research objectives for this examination are both historical and philosophical. The historical
objective is to retrace the appearance of the notion of culture in the works of Paul Ricoeur (1913-
2005), and to demonstrate that Ricoeur adopts and adapts the term to his philosophical vocabulary.
The accompanying philosophical objective, the proper task of this dissertation, is equally twofold. At the
scholarly level this dissertation reconstructs – in the form of a hermeneutic of cultural recognition –
Paul Ricoeur’s cultural theory, and explicates why such a theory is necessary relative to Ricoeur’s
more openly-argued anthropological phenomenology of “being able.” I maintain that all
anthropological thought requires the support of cultural understanding, as no comprehensive
anthropology is possible without the philosophical elaboration of the cultural condition that
concerns human situatedness.
The ultimate aim of this dissertation, however, is to go beyond this scholarly analysis
and point out a subjective cultural hermeneutic process under the peculiar “dramatic” modality of
this dissertation. This postcritical process is what I sum up with the term re-con-naissance. The
reception of a cultural heritage is reaffirmed in the incessant task of acquiring a notion of one’s self
through hermeneutic reappropriation, or, as a perpetual task of freedom and the fulfillment of
fundamental human possibilities in the interpretation of one’s culture. Put differently, the matter of
this dissertation is to recognize (reconnaître) this level of cultural hermeneutics that is unceasingly
present; to expose a postcritical depth structure that takes place in the reader’s own reconfigurative process
as culturally enabled re-con-naissance. Since this hermeneutic concerns the postcritical interpretive
reflection of a living, acting and struggling human subject – and is, therefore, not directly explainable
– this reconfiguration can only be pointed at or suggested. In spite of its postcritical aim, therefore,
the dissertation remains an academic work that functions at the level of critical explanation. The
postcritical cultural hermeneutics has to be approached through the critical means that are
exemplified by the scholarly analysis in this dissertation; our analysis stands for the critical and
objectifying (academic) culture within which the reader reads this dissertation as a cultural and
interpretive subject.
After having propaedeutically explained the critical scholarly course and the ultimate
postcritical task of this dissertation in part one, part two then breaks open the realm of cultural
hermeneutics in the work of Paul Ricoeur by “letting it appear” through the critical analysis of the
different perceptions concerning his last major work The Course of Recognition. This is the moment of
“re-” or re-membering again the cultural condition. Ricoeur’s post-Hegelian notion of “cultural
objectification” necessitates, however, examining the synthetic moment of “con.” Part three analyzes
this “con” by pointing out a trajectory of Ricoeur’s “post-Hegelian Kantian” though in his early
works that runs from the condition of objectivity to cultural objectivity, and furthermore to a
poetically constituted hermeneutic of culture. In turn, part four contrasts Ricoeur’s thought with that
of Martin Heidegger, focusing on Ricoeur’s later works that propose an etho-poetics of culture that
is manifested in institution. Part four, which closes off the scholarly analysis of Ricoeur’s cultural
hermeneutics, thereby displays the moment of “naissance,” or “having-been-born-as-an-ethico-
political-subject.” The last part of this dissertation, part five, distances itself from the academic or
scholarly mode by revealing the underlying “dramatic” structure of this dissertation. As a re-reading
of the reading of Ricoeur’s work in parts two, three, and four, part five exposes a new dimension to
the whole of this work; namely, an experiential one that concerns the current reader of the work and
his or her cultural re-con-naissance.
i

CONTENTS
PART I INTRODUCTION: RICOEUR, CULTURE, AND HERMENEUTICS 0

1. GENERAL INTRODUCTION 1

2. RICOEUR AND THE QUESTION OF CULTURE 13
2.1 The Culture/Civilization Confusion 18
2.2 Between Philosophical Anthropology and Cultural Hermeneutics 24
2.3 Ricoeur, Cassirer, and Geertz 29
Ricoeur and Cultural-Symbolic Mediation 31
Ricoeur and Clifford Geertz 34
Ricoeur and Ernst Cassirer 40

3. RICOEUR AND POSTCRITICAL HERMENEUTICS 49
3.1 Hermeneutic of Postcritical Innocence 50
3.2 Hermeneutic of Reconfiguration 54
Mimesis 56
1
Mimesis 59
2
Mimesis 61
3
3.3 Hermeneutics of Postcritical Understanding 64

4. REFLECTIONS 70
ii
PART II THE CULTURAL COURSE OF RECOGNITION 73

5. HERMENEUTICS, CONFLICT, AND REFLECTION 77
5.1 A Conflict of Interpretations 78
5.2 Reading Ricoeur’s Course of Recognition 82
The Analytic Attempt 85
The Pure Vision 92
The Anthropological Journey 104

6. A HERMENEUTIC OF SYMBOLIC RECOGNITION 111
6.1 The Idea of Symbolic Recognition 113
6.2 The Gift of Symbolic Language 121
6.3 From Forgetfulness to Re-membering 129

7. THE COURSE OF CULTURAL FORMATION 141
7.1 The Course of Recognition and Anerkennung 145
7.2 Re-cognition: A Ricoeurian An-erkennung 155
7.3 Ricoeur and Cultural Formation 170

8. REFLECTIONS ON RE-CON-NAISSANCE 188
iii
PART III RECOGNIZING SELFHOOD IN CULTURAL OBJECTIVITY 192

9. ANTHROPOLOGY AND OBJECTIVITY 199
9.1 The Reflective Self: Prereflective Imputation and Self-objectification 199
9.2 An Authentic Choice as Practical Action 206
9.3 The Spell: the Detour of Objectivity 212

10. THE OBJECTS OF HUMAN WORKS 222
10.1 The Synthesis under Objects: the Formal Unity of Consciousness 225
10.2 Ideal Self-consciousness and the Enigma of Respect 238
10.3 Cultural Objectivity and the “Signs of Being Human” 249
The Quest for Having 257
The Quest for Power 259
The Quest for Esteem 261

11. A HERMENEUTIC OF CULTURAL OBJECTS 268
11.1 Toward a Hermeneutic Reflection on “the Signs of Being Human” 268
11.2 An Analytic of Culture 278
11.3 A Hermeneutic of Culture 287
The Indirect Approach: Feelings as a Key to the Creation of Sense 289
Re-interpretation: the Quests for Having, Power, and Esteem 292
Mytho-poetics: the Creation of Cultural Meaning 297

12. REFLECTIONS ON RE-CON-NAISSANCE 302
iv
PART IV THE ETHO-POETIC ESSENCE OF CULTURE 306

13. POETICS AND THE BECOMING OF CULTURAL BEING 317
13.1 The Poetic Ricoeur: the Origin 317
13.2 The Birth of Meaning as the Becoming of Our Being 323
13.3 Critical and Ontological Poetics 328

14. POETICS OF CULTURAL ACTION 339
14.1 Explanation-Understanding as a Clarification of “Tensional” Poetics 340
14.2 Poetic Work: from Discourse to Cultural Action 348
14.3 Toward the Poetics of Sociocultural Action 356

15. ETHO-POETICS: THE ESSENCE OF CULTURAL EXISTENCE 368
15.1 Appropriated Identity and the Ethics of Narrations 368
15.2 The Birth of an Ethico-Political Self: Cultural Recognition 378
15.3 The Limit: le Tout Autre 390
The Otherness of Heidegger 391
Reversal: Retrospection to the Essential 395
Hope: the Prime Wager 408

16. REFLECTIONS ON RE-CON-NAISSANCE 419
v
PART V THE FIFTH ACT: RE-CON-NAISSANCE 425

17. A RESPONSIVE SELF: SUMMATION OF REPLIES TO RESEARCH OBJECTIVES 432

18. RECONFIGURATION AND RE-CON-NAISSANCE 440
Re-membering the Prefiguration 443
Con-joining as Configuration 446
Being Born with Refiguration: Naissance 450

APPENDICES 459
APPENDIX 1 – THE CONCEPT OF CULTURE AND ITS CONTENTS 460
The General Features of Culture 461
A Brief History of the Culture Concept 471
Critical Application: the Case of French Resistance 479
APPENDIX 2 – WORKS ON RICOEUR’S CULTURAL HERMENEUTICS 482
Ozdowski: a Scientific-Marxist Approach 483
Sumares: a Socio-Political View on Culture 486
Cobb: Supplementing a Discussion of the Theology of Culture 491
Madila-Basanguka: the Ethico-Religious Core of Cultural Poetics 495
Mattern: Linguistic Interculturality in the Light of Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics 502
APPENDIX 3 – RICOEUR’S 1961 CULTURE/CIVILIZATION CONFUSION 507
APPENDIX 4 – PAUL CLAUDEL AND THE QUESTION OF RE/CONNAISSANCE 519

BIBLIOGRAPHY 525