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Title: Oneself As Another by Paul Ricoeur, Kathleen Blamey ISBN: 0-226-71329-6 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: 01 September, 1994 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (2 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: "There is no Self without Other ..."
Comment: Paul Ricoeur is an extraordinarily learned man, whose enormous cultural awareness is combined with sensitivity and subtlety as well as powerful originality to produce wonderful books that will outlive us all.
In this work, he takes up the problematic of "alterity," that is to say, of "Self and Other," which is traced in the Western tradition at least as far back as Hegel's "dialectic of master and slave." Ricoeur suggests that: "Perhaps the most lasting legacy of Hegel's philosophical efforts generally is the insight ... that identity is constituted in and 'through' otherness." Along with thinkers as diverse as Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and Hans Georg Gadamer, he also suggests that our identities are first and most fundamentally constituted within our cultures, our histories, but especially our languages, all of which are necessarily shared and (by definition) communal. We all find ourselves "placed in language," Ricoeur writes, "before we can possess ourselves in consciousness."
In the words of the British psychiatrist R.D. Laing, "there is no Self without Other."
This leads Ricoeur to the issues of identity and meaning as the project of myth-creation and symbol-interpretation within our respective cultures that he will take up in the volumes of "Time and Narrative." In my own book: "Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Freedom" (2004), I concluded -- "Human being, for Ricoeur, is always a BEING INTERPRETED. Interpretation is how we perpetuate and advance our freedom. It is how we become the persons we are. Only in our collective constructions of the Other do we [create or] become 'ourselves,' for this is the only mirror in which we can see our inner selves truly, thereby fulfilling Nietzsche's mandate to ... 'become the persons we are.'"
"Oneself as Another" is a contemporary masterpiece in the tradition of phenomenological-hermeneutics. You ought to read it.
Rating: 3
Summary: Subjecthood?? Subject positions?? Self-subjection??
Comment: As I understand it, the goal of Ricoeur's studies is to formulate a notion of the subject that is not susceptible to the same objections and aporia as Descartes's cogito. To accomplish this, he analyzes discursive situations and comes to the conclusion that the subject is first and foremost a being, i.e., a body in space, and that the subject understands herself first and foremost as such. Grammar reveals this self-objectivation (to borrow a term from Habermas) in that the reflexive "I" is a grammatical substitution for a corresponding third-person deictic term: "I" is the "she" of the speaking subject to the "he/him" is the "you" of the interlocutor as told from the perspective of the speaking subject, who occupies the same spatiotemporal point as the subject's particular body.
Ricoeur's findings appear rather plausible, but I cannot help but think that his findings imply sort of transcendental, or perhaps I should say, para- or transsubjective, awareness on the part of the subject that is inarticulable (neologism?) yet essential to her awareness as a body within a discursive situation. In other words, by virtue of the fact that the subject grammatically isolates herself differentially vis-à-vis her interlocutor in a discursive situation seems to me to imply that the subject's self-awareness is not as spatiotemporally limited as the body that it inhabits, or, more accurately with which it is coextensive (consubstantial?). I therefore remain uncertain on how prioritizing the corporeal subject before the thinking subject avoids the aporia of Cartesian subjectivity.
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Title: Time and Narrative (Vol.1) by Paul Ricoeur, Kathleen Blamey, David Pellauer, Paul Rico ISBN: 0226713326 Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Trd) Pub. Date: September, 1990 List Price(USD): $14.69 |
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Title: Time and Narrative (Vol.2) by Paul Ricoeur, Kathleen Blamey, David Pellauer, Paul Rico ISBN: 0226713342 Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Trd) Pub. Date: September, 1990 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: Time and Narrative (Vol.3) by Paul Ricoeur, Kathleen Blamey, David Pellauer, Paul Rico ISBN: 0226713369 Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Trd) Pub. Date: November, 1990 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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Title: Ricoeur As Another: The Ethics of Subjectivity (Suny Series in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences) by Richard A. Cohen, James L. Marsh ISBN: 0791451909 Publisher: State Univ of New York Pr Pub. Date: February, 2002 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title: Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination by Paul Ricoeur, David Pellauer, Paul Rico, Mark I. Wallace ISBN: 0800628942 Publisher: Fortress Press Pub. Date: November, 1995 List Price(USD): $27.00 |
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