THE IMAGINATION IN THE POST- KANTIAN

PHI­LOSOPHY OF PAUL RICOEUR

DAVID N. POWER

          Much current writing on the role of the imagination in moral action has its roots in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. On the one hand he posited a connection between imagination and pure reason, in terms of the pure intuition of space and time. On the other hand, in his Critique of Judgment he posited a relation between aesthetics, the beau­tiful, moral judgment and teleology. Ever since, for philosophers and ethicists interested in the role of the imagination in the development of the moral life of the person or of society, how these fields of human action can be brought together has been a key problem. A starting-point is in fact found in Kant’s notion of the symbol that relates the beautiful to the morally good. Symbolic representation does not present a concept directly, as does transcendental schematism, but only indirectly, as there is no proper schema for the concept. The representation of the symbol in its relation to the morally good and its teleology is not reproductive but rather the occasion for reflection. Though Kant is more interested in the world of natural beauty in its inspiration of good than in artistic expres­sion, from this starting-point of the symbol in fact the whole world of artistic creation could be opened up as a world in which the power of the imagination and of feeling is explored.

          In this essay, I will focus on the work of Paul Ricoeur rather than trying to encompass the whole range of writings and ideas pertinent to this question since Kant. An advantage of taking Ricoeur as a central focus is that he has developed his own thought over the years in the form of dialogue with philosophers both ancient and modern and has ad­dressed just about every issue that has emerged in contemporary philoso­phy and praxis. At times that makes his thought rather tattered, but it also means that readers have to tackle the questions for themselves rather than depending on his answers. This being the case, evidently my pre­sentation is quite incomplete, as it is also an interpretative reading that tends primarily to the questions raised by him, and by us in terms of the imagination.

THE ASCENT OF FEELING AND THE QUEST FOR HISTORICAL UNITY1

          Friedrich Schleiermacher transposed the Kantian approach to the moral good to the world of the religious. To all religious expres­sion there is an a priori of religious feeling. There is a paradox of identity/non- identity between religious expression and reli­gious feeling which leaves the way open to mis interpretation and mis understanding between people. These can be overcome, however, in the effort to remain in touch with the authentic reli­gious feeling that is the transcendental of human expe­rience common to all.

          Naturally, this raises the issue of how different historical epochs and different cultures can communicate and contribute from one to another, and especially how a historical religion like Christianity can be ever effective. Distinguishing between the natural sciences with their empirical field, and the human sciences with their interest in inner spirit and its ideals, Wil­helm Dilthey completed the critiques of Kant with the critique of historical reason. He wished to embrace not only psychologi­cal conditions, but also historical contexts, and to find a way which would enable human beings to understand each other across the barriers of history. He believed this to be possible because of a common human nature, with its core sensibility common to all, and because of the power of language and other symbolic forms to capture this life in specific cultural realiza­tions. Because of the convergence of the common and the par­ ticular, it is possible to understand the past and to see a com­munality in diversity running through history. History in effect is the manifesta­tion or expression of the movement of the Spir­it, and its individual life-expressions form the interlinking of history.

          Ricoeur considered the great contribution of Dilthey to be his insistence that life can be grasped only through its media­tions. Dilthey, however, appeared to renege on this perception in the effort to find what is behind the text, as though in the end by some psychic sympathy the life itself of the other could be grasped.2 It has always been Ricoeur’s contention that the dis­tanciation between life and text means that we are always one stage removed from the immediacy of life. One must learn, there­fore, to deal with texts as texts (and similarly for other forms of expression), rather than seeing them as a way to a mediated immediacy to life-forces or to being.3

          The optimism born of Dilthey’s thought, which worked its way into religious studies, biblical hermeneutics and even liter­ary criticism, had to contend with three other developments. The first was the domi­nance of the empirical in the form of great advances in the sciences and technology, which tended to give priority in the ordering of human life to these sciences, with an assertive independence from more basic values. The second was the intense suspicion regarding the potentially des­truc­tive power of the imaginative that resulted from Sigmund Freud’s un­earthing of the subconscious. This suspicion was en­hanced by Nietzsche’s dissection of subject-centred reason and the will to power, and by Marx’s critique of the corroboration of oppressive and alienating power systems by ideologies that project an idealized order. The third was disil­lusionment with the mythical and its incapacitating effect upon historical narra­tive because of its tendency to confuse form with reality.

          These three developments lead to a suspicion of the im­agination, where one can opt only for a liberation from its trammels by the use of reason, by psychological release or by a religious faith that falls back on the centrality of feeling and is agnostic about the historical. If one con­cludes that the only thing held in common across history and culture is existential anger, then the possibilities of a right objective order recede before the purely subjective. All efforts at a social ordering must be seen as illusory and manipulative, whether they be economic, political or religious. The power of creative imagina­tion in ordering social life is virtually denied, a conclusion which paradoxically leaves the way ever more open for its man­ipulative control by idealist and ideological sys­tems.

          Behind the mechanistic ordering of modern life, Martin Heidegger saw the forgetfulness of Being and the dominance of the rational, which he blamed upon the confusion between be­ings and Being in Western metaphysics. To avoid individual despair Heidegger advocated authentic living in a being-towards-death, but to avoid cultural despair he attrib­uted a power to wrestle with the forgetfulness of Being to poetic language.4 In doing this latter, however, did he lapse into a cultural idealism that could tolerate the thought of the superman and the superior culture advocated by Nazism?5

          In looking for a way that makes objective interpretation possible without losing sight of the subjective, Hans-Georg Gadamer sought to retrieve the cultural models of the work of art and the classic. He saw this as a unifying principle of human understanding that could overcome the separation of the empirical and the human sciences. There are indeed distinguishable regions of our rela­tions with the world which give rise to the distinction between the sciences. There are, however, com parable procedures of understanding to all the sciences; these have to do with the detec­tion of patterns and paradigms and the projection of explanato­ry hypotheses which need verification. Art, history and language are indeed fields of expression that put human beings more fully in touch with their fundamental belongingness to the world and to the truth of being than the empirical sciences. These latter genuinely serve the pur­suit of the common good only in an order that maintains the relation and interaction between culture, human sciences and empirical sciences.

          As for the conditions of interpretation, given the wide diversity of the cultural and the historical interpretation across time is possible with due attention to the three factors of prejudice, praxis and horizon. This makes conversation and the continuing expansion of human conscious­ness possible. The first of these, the rehabilitation of prejudice, means that both individual per­sons and groups must recognize the preconcep­tions, bias and judgments which they bring to any act of interpretation, as well as to the reading of this past. Such prejudice is not under­stood pejoratively; it is simply a recognized condition of human understanding. Praxis means that we recognize the interest and the orientation to action which is present in understanding and in interpretation, so that these are in effect inse parable.

          Horizon seems a quite elusive concept in Gadamer. He defines it as “the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point,” and adds that “a person who has an horizon knows the relative significance of everything within this horizon.”6 One actually is able to expand it by seeing beyond it and accepting new ques­tions. A fusion of horizons occurs when people come together from different start­ing-points in a genuine conversation and find that they enter a common horizon in sharing common questions and in mutually acknowledging prejudices which they leave open to question, as well as interests in common issues regarding action.

          While Gadamer vigorously asserts that he has only laid out what actually happens in the process of understanding and has not attempted a social critique, there are those who wonder whether there is not an ex­cessive optimism to his ideal of con­versation. Has he truly probed the need for imaginative expres­sion in the first place; if not he is prone to be victim to its delusive power. In the second place, has he brought enough suspicion to the power of ideology to distort not only the social but the very inner expressions of language and art? These ac­cusations are made forcefully by Jürgen Habermas and the De­constructionists. At this point we can turn to Ricoeur who tries to take account of all positions.

RICOEUR: THE THRALDOM OF FINITUDE AND FALLIBILITY7

          With Gadamer, one is aware that philosophy has made the turn to the consideration of operations rather than of human faculties, as was the case with classical philosophy. One does not so much have to attrib­ute actions to each of the faculties, including sense, will, understanding and imagination, as to see how humans perform. Imagining can be con­sidered as an act, inclusive of affective, cognitive and operative force, so that there is less need to distinguish it from intellect and will.8

          Pursued by his fascination with the powerlessness of the will to have, to exercise power and to be in freedom, Paul Ricoeur adopted the form of Husserl’s eidetics to initiate a multi-volume study of the human will (will as will-ing, not as faculty), which may or may not yet be fin­ished with the three volumes of Time and Narrative.9 It was indeed in the realization of the dominat­ing appetite to have, to hold power and to be free, countered by the viciousness inherent in the thwarted historical and cul­tural efforts to realize these appetites, that Ricoeur perceived a radical incapacity on the part of human nature either to under­stand itself or to realize its goal to be. That very goal can be misconceived and mis­construed radically as the will for having and for power, whereas the ultimate will is, of course, to con­stitute one ’s own being and one’s own freedom.

          This apparently clear analysis of the human condition is misleading in its very clarity. Not only is there a weakness of will, there is also a blindness of perception behind our flawed existence and our destructive use of things and of power. If the language of reason and of analysis cannot clarify and occasion a redirection of forces, what can? Ricoeur’s first postulate for the role of the imaginative comes thus from the need to assume an indirect form of language in expressing human finitude, and especially in addressing human fault and formulating human desire. He sees this effort to find what has to be a liberating expression (both purgative and energy-freeing) to be as old as human history and as mul­tiform as human culture. He endeavours to systematize it in a classifica­tion of primary symbols and myths.10 The most archaic symbols are those which express fault and tend to make their appearance in confessions of sin; he classifies these under the headings of stain, sin (or straying) and guilt. The myths which he explores in order to locate these symbols in a context of meaning are those of creation, tragedy, exile and the Adamic.

          The ability of this imaginative expression, first to unveil, next to bring into individual and collective consciousness, the conflicting drives of desire, and then to bring them to thought, provides understanding that allows for some rational ordering of the human project. However, the symbolic and mythical is not to be seen simply as a temporal or historical stage in consciousness on the way towards greater clarity and freedom. It is a founda­tion that has to be ever renewed and kept alive, both because it can continually show us our delusions and escapisms and because it can release energy. Whenever a culture or a group in a soci­ety, whether political or religious, believe and act as if they have achieved full con­sciousness, complete understanding and absolute norms of behavior, they have in effect given way to the demonic of a collusion between thwarted desire and imagina­tion. They can be saved only by a retrieval of the ambiguous polysemy and polyenergy of the imaginative, with its inher­ent humility of non-totality. Though contemporary cultures cannot be expected to live in the naivete of the mythical, they have to capture a seconde naivete that keeps them in tune with the power of the imagina­tive to express: (i) humanity’s oneness with the known and the expanding world, (ii) humanity’s limited perception and bound freedom, (iii) hum­anity’s finitude, and (iv) humanity’s profound desire for the gift of infinitude.

          At this stage of his project, Ricoeur had posited the roots of imag­ination in desire. He had also given it a role in the project of the self. He tended, however, to give it a rather representational character, a func­tion that showed up the flaws in human existence and the disillusion­ments or false ambitions to be overcome in coming to be in freedom. Only in the section of the Symbolism of Evil on the Adamic or eschato­logical myth, where he draws on Christian sources, does he seem to touch on a creative imagination that brings forward the work of redemp­tion. Still, the operative axiom of this work, much repeated by those who have read him, is “The Symbol gives rise to thought.”

          Ricoeur found a fuller exploration of the imaginative possible through a dialogue with Freud. Some find this dialogue perverted by mis understanding, but at any rate Ricoeur develops it within his own quest for the clue in the imagination to the desire to be.11 Thus he elabo­rates upon the archeology and the teleology of the imagination and in this way develops the relation of the imagination to desire. It still has an archeological task, digging up as it were the contours of desire as well as its frustrations. More importantly, it has a teleological task, one that drawing upon its own power to recreate opens the way to the fulfillment of desire in the resolution of frustration and disorientation. By stressing the importance which Freud gave to the narration and interpretation of dreams, rather than simply to the dreams them­selves, Ricoeur showed that one must not confuse image with imagining. To imagine is to reor­der, to resolve conflicts, to open up possibilities of relationship and of being.

          Ricoeur accepts Freud’s depiction of the influence of desire on aesthetic and religious cultural expressions, but rejects any suggestion of reduction to the sexual and to familial relations. In fact, he reads some of Hegel’s attempt to embrace the whole of cul­ture and his preference for the master/slave relation in an explication of systems, along with the notion of archeology/­ teleology that he attributes to Freud. Freud would lead him to suspect what is behind idealized individual conduct. Hegel show­ed him the need to see the work of the imagination in the context of the entire human enterprise and to relate the desire to be to its total context. Marx and Nietzsche allow him to suspect what is behind ideal­ized social conduct and system, for what they camouflage of inordinate desire and what they project by way of quest for a human absolute.

          For the teleological power of the imagination in realizing the hu­man project, and for doing so in a way that respects moral value, he continued to evoke the work of Kant. Indeed, in Kant’s notion of the symbol and in his distinction between pure reason and the categories of practical reason ( God, Law, Free­dom) that order the moral life, he found an invitation to think beyond what the mind represents. There is a sug­gestion in this of a cognitive function inherent to the Kantian imagina­tio