didactica de la historia

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010 DOI: 10.1163/187226310X536231

Journal of the Philosophy of History 4 (2010) 411–434 brill.nl/jph

Historical Consciousness and the Identity of Philosophy

Robert PierceyUniversity of Regina, Canada

[email protected]

AbstractIt is now widely accepted that philosophers should be historically self-conscious. But what does this mean in practice? How does historical consciousness change the way we philosophize? To answer this question, I examine two philosophers who put historical consciousness at the heart of their projects: Richard Rorty and Paul Ricoeur. Rorty and Ricoeur both argue that historical consciousness leads us to see philosophy as fragmented. It leads us to view our thinking from multiple perspectives at once, perspectives that are often in considerable tension. But Rorty and Ricoeur reach radically different conclusions about how we should respond to this fragmentation. Their disagreement, I argue, is closely connected to their views of identity. Rorty and Ricoeur have different understandings of what it means for something to be unified, and thus different ideas about what it would take for our perspectives on ourselves to be brought together. My argument for this claim has four parts. First, I try to identify the problems that historical consciousness raises for philosophy, and explain why the most common response to them is unsatisfac-tory. Second, I discuss Rorty’s claim that historical consciousness ought to make us ironists about our philosophical views, and to abandon truth as a goal of inquiry. Third, I contrast Rorty’s position with Ricoeur’s. Ricoeur argues that we can be historically self-aware and still see philosophy as a rational enterprise that aims at truth. I argue that Ricoeur’s optimism on this point is rooted in his view of identity, and specifically in his distinction between idem- and ipse-identity. Finally, I ask what all of this shows about the options available to historically minded philosophers today.

Keywordshistory, self-consciousness, Rorty, Ricoeur, identity, incommensurability

412 R. Piercey / Journal of the Philosophy of History 4 (2010) 411–434

It has become something of a cliché that philosophers should be histori-cally self-conscious. Philosophical thinking, the story goes, is always the product of a highly specific history, and this history shapes how philoso-phers think and what they can hope to achieve. In Truth and Method, Gadamer describes their predicament as follows:

However important and fundamental were the transformations that took place with the Latinization of Greek concepts and the translation of Latin conceptual language into the modern languages, the emergence of historical consciousness over the last few centuries is a much more radical rupture. Since then, the continuity of the Western philosophical tradition has been effective only in a fragmentary way. We have lost that naive innocence with which traditional concepts were made to serve one’s thinking.1

Gadamer goes on to argue that a “new critical consciousness must now accompany all responsible philosophizing,”2 a consciousness that is aware of its origins and that modifies its ambitions accordingly. Many other thinkers echo Gadamer’s claim. Robert Bernasconi says that contemporary philosophy must exhibit a “readiness to face the challenge posed by the recognition of the historicity of philosophy.”3 Similarly, Robert Scharff speaks of the need of “denying the possibility of a neutral or presupposi-tionless standpoint and for affirming on the contrary that every inquiry and every meta-inquiry is the determinate act of a determinate thinker whose very nature is to ‘be’ historical.”4 All of these thinkers see historical

1) Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall (New York: Crossroads, 1992), xxiv. Gadamer discusses this phenomenon in greater detail in “The Problem of Historical Consciousness,” in Interpretive Social Science: A Second Look, ed. Paul Rabinow and William Sullivan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 82–140. In particular, he describes historical self-consciousness as the “full awareness of the historicity of everything present and the relativity of all opinions,” and he claims that it is “the most important revolution . . . since the beginning of the modern epoch” (89). 2) Gadamer, Truth and Method, xxv.3) Robert Bernasconi, The Question of Language in Heidegger’s History of Being (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1985), 1.4) Robert Scharff, “On Weak Postpositivism: Ahistorical Rejections of the View From Nowhere,” Metaphilosophy 38, no. 4 ( July 2007): 510.

R. Piercey / Journal of the Philosophy of History 4 (2010) 411–434 413

consciousness as a challenge, if not a threat. They argue that when philoso-phy becomes self-conscious, it must rethink what it is and what it can do.

But it is one thing to say that philosophers should be historically self-conscious, and another to explain how they should do so. What does the demand for heightened self-consciousness mean in practice? How, con-cretely, does it change the way we philosophize? My goal here is to shed some light on these difficult questions by examining two philosophers who put historical self-consciousness at the heart of their projects: Richard Rorty and Paul Ricoeur. Rorty and Ricoeur agree with Gadamer that when philosophy becomes self-conscious, it loses the “naïve innocence with which traditional concepts were made to serve one’s thinking.” Specifically, they think historical self-consciousness leads us to see our philosophizing as fragmented: that is, to view our thinking from multiple perspectives, perspectives that are in considerable tension. But Rorty and Ricoeur reach radically different conclusions about what this fact implies for the practice of philosophy. They agree about the existence of multiple perspectives, but disagree about whether we can satisfactorily reconcile them. Why? My hypothesis is that their disagreement is intimately connected to their views of identity. Rorty and Ricoeur have different understandings of what it means for something to be unified, and thus different ideas about what it would take for our various perspectives on ourselves to be brought together. By examining their views on this matter, I hope to see what Rorty and Ricoeur can teach us about the options available to historically minded philosophers today. I want to suggest that, if we wish to preserve philoso-phy’s traditional aspirations in an age of historical self-awareness, we must understand the concept of identity somewhat differently than we might initially be tempted to do. Ricoeur, I argue, can help us do exactly that.

The rest of this paper falls into four parts. In the first, I explain what historical consciousness is and what problems it raises for philosophy. I also examine a common response to these problems, and explain why I find it unsatisfactory. In the second section, I turn to a philosopher who has given more sustained attention to the problem of historical conscious-ness: Richard Rorty. For Rorty, I argue, historical consciousness involves recognizing that the way we philosophize has been shaped by contingent metaphors. As Rorty sees it, this recognition turns us into ironists about our philosophical views, and leads us to abandon truth as a goal of inquiry. The paper’s third section contrasts Rorty’s response with the one articulated


by Paul Ricoeur. Like Rorty, Ricoeur thinks historical consciousness is a problem because it lets us adopt different perspectives on ourselves and our thinking. Unlike Rorty, he thinks we can concede this fact and still see philosophy as a rational enterprise that aims at truth. I claim that Ricoeur’s optimism on this point is rooted in his view of identity, and specifically in his distinction between idem- and ipse-identity. In the paper’s fourth sec-tion, I ask what all of this shows about the challenges facing philosophy today.

Finally, two caveats. First, my discussions of Rorty and Ricoeur are nec-essarily brief. I focus on just two texts: Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and the third volume of Time and Narrative. This selective focus is unavoid-able, given both thinkers’ prodigious bodies of work. A full account of their views of historical consciousness would have to explore many other texts: Rorty’s remarks on philosophy in works such as Philosophy and Social Hope, as well as Ricoeur’s further reflections on identity in Oneself as Another and The Course of Recognition. But while a single essay cannot do justice to these thinkers, it can, I think, sketch the main differences between them. That is all I hope to do here. Second, it should be clear that when I speak of the “identity” of philosophy – as I do in this paper’s tile – I use this term in two different ways. The first is as an antonym for “difference.” Two things are identical to the extent that they do not differ from each other. But “identity” can also mean “self-image” or “self-understanding” – as it does in the phrase “identity politics,” for example. I have chosen to use a single term for both senses in order to emphasize the link between them. I want to show that our view of what it means for things not to differ has surprising implications for our view of what philosophy is. There is a risk of confusion here, but it is a risk worth running.

I

What does it mean to be historically self-conscious? And what happens when historical self-consciousness comes into contact with philosophy? In general terms, philosophers become self-conscious when they notice that how they think, and what they think about, are conditioned by cultural factors, factors largely outside their control. These factors may include the communities to which they belong, the natural languages they speak, or the worldviews and ideologies they inherit from their societies. These fac-


tors incline philosophers to ask some questions and not others, and to answer these questions in certain ways rather than others. Moreover, cul-tures develop over time, and so the cultural factors that affect philosophy can and do change. The guidance that philosophers derive from their cul-tures can vary from place to place and from time to time. The philosopher who recognizes this fact sees that she happens to have certain philosophical intuitions, as well as certain ideas about what a philosophical question is and what counts as a good answer to one. But, she reasons, she has inher-ited these ideas from her culture. That culture might have evolved differ-ently, and if it had, she might have very different ideas about how, and what, philosophers should think. This insight is especially troubling since philosophy often aspires to be perennial. It seeks to answer the big ques-tions about reality and our place in it, questions that occur, or ought to occur, to everyone who reflects. But when philosophers notice how they have been influenced by historical forces, they tend to see their intuitions and methods as contingent and optional, rather than as forced on them by the nature of things. In short, when philosophers become historically self-conscious, they find themselves torn between two different ways of looking at themselves and their activity. As unreflective practitioners of this activ-ity, they see themselves as asking the questions philosophers should ask, and as employing the methods philosophers should use to answer them. But as reflective, detached observers of this activity, they see these ques-tions and methods as the contingent product of a particular history. To the extent that they occupy one of these perspectives, they find it hard to take the other seriously. At bottom, then, historical self-consciousness involves fragmentation, a split in philosophy’s view of itself. It leads philosophers to oscillate between opposed perspectives on what they do, and to despair of bringing these perspectives together.5

But what should philosophers do once they become historically self-conscious? The general answer seems clear enough: they should acknowl-edge the historicity of their thinking, and philosophize in a way that is self-aware. As Gadamer puts it, a philosophy that is historically self-conscious

5) Fragmentation is also a key element of Gadamer’s view of historical self-consciousness. Today, he claims, “it would be absurd to confine oneself to the naiveté and reassuring limits of a jealous tradition,” since “modern consciousness is ready to understand the possibility of a multiplicity of relative viewpoints.” See Gadamer, “The Problem of Historical Con-sciousness,” 89.


“no longer listens sanctimoniously to the voice that reaches out from the past but, in reflecting on it, replaces it within the context where it took root.”6 But what exactly does this involve? More to the point, how do we know when, or whether, we are doing it properly? These are difficult ques-tions, because the charge that one is insufficiently self-conscious is in prin-ciple unanswerable. In this respect, it is like the charge that one is a bad writer. If someone says that my writing is unclear, there is nothing I can do that is guaranteed to demonstrate that she is wrong.7 I can try to express myself more clearly, and I can restate my point in simpler language. But if she continues to insist that my writing is incomprehensible, there is noth-ing I can do to change her mind. The same is true of the charge that one’s thinking is insufficiently self-aware. When faced with this charge, I can point out all the ways in which my thinking seems to me to be historically self-conscious. But if a critic persists in claiming that I am not self-aware enough, there is nothing I can say that will prove she is wrong. The lesson, I think, is that it is not enough to assert that philosophers should be his-torically self-aware and leave it at that. We need something more explicit: an account of what, in practice, historical self-consciousness requires. Such an account should allow us to distinguish pieces of philosophy that are not sufficiently self-conscious from those that are. In the absence of such an account, it is impossible to say when we are thinking as we should.

Such an account, however, is hard to find. It is much easier to criticize a thinker for not being self-aware than to say what she ought to be doing instead. A recent article by Robert Scharff is instructive here. Scharff’s arti-cle attacks what it calls “weak postpositivism”8 – that is, the tendency to criticize others philosophers for their ahistoricism, while failing to see that one’s critique of them is itself historically conditioned. The weak postposi-tivist denies “that philosophy might ever transcend the conditions of its origin, bracket off the concerns of its time and place, and ultimately take

6) Gadamer, “The Problem of Historical Consciousness,” 90.7) I owe this point to John McCumber, who puts it this way: “Clarity, as a norm for speech and writing, presents a paradox: although the burden of achieving it falls on the speaker, the achievement itself apparently falls on the hearer. I can labor mightily to produce a clear essay, argument or sentence. But I have not actually produced it until you agree that I have.” See John McCumber, “The Metaphysics of Clarity and the Freedom of Meaning,” in Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena, ed. Jonathan D. Culler and Kevin Lamb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 58.8) Scharff, “Weak Postpositivism,” 509.


up the viewpoint of an all-seeing eye.”9 She criticizes philosophical revolu-tionaries such as Descartes and Husserl for trying to philosophize from nowhere in particular. But her postpositivism is “weak” in that she offers these criticisms “as if from Nowhere.”10 Scharff admonishes quite a few contemporary philosophers who “reject in ahistorical terms an ahistorical conception of philosophy.”11 He criticizes Margaret Wilson for saying that contemporary philosophers should choose to study the history of philoso-phy. In Scharff’s view, to describe our link to the past in this way is to “reinforce the positivist assumption that we can leave the past behind – that our relationship to tradition is a matter of choice.”12 Scharff also criti-cizes Charles Taylor for describing the break with positivism as a form of progress, and as marking an “epistemic gain”13 over classical epistemology. According to Scharff, to speak of gains and progress here is to cling unwit-tingly to an ahistorical view of philosophy and its goals.

In short, Scharff has a great deal to say about what is wrong with the postpositivism of Wilson, Taylor, and others. But when it comes to explain-ing what they should be doing instead, he is surprisingly silent. He has little to say about what a properly self-aware approach to philosophy would look like. Indeed, he suggests that trying to spell this out is unhelpful and even dangerous. “It would,” he says,

be comfortably question-begging to reconstruct their ‘positions’ and measure them against some (allegedly up-to-date) Epistemological criteria. Instead, I suggest that we ask the following question – with an ear for its degree of reso-nance in our own circumstances. From what implicit orientation are such thinkers ‘already’ struggling to speak when they express the need for a ‘lived transition’ from their inherited positivism toward an analytic philosophy that has ‘climbed out of this error?’ And to what extent and in what ways do we share this orientation?14

In other words, the proper response to weak postpositivism is to look at ourselves: to ask whether and to what extent we share its inconsistencies.

9) Scharff, “Weak Postpositivism,” 510.10) Scharff, “Weak Postpositivism,” 510.11) Scharff, “Weak Postpositivism,” 510–11.12) Scharff, “Weak Postpositivism,” 517.13) Scharff, “Weak Postpositivism,” 528.14) Scharff, “Weak Postpositivism,” 529–30.


Rather than trying to cure the illness, we should look even more relent-lessly for its symptoms. Scharff goes on to suggest that:

we might reformulate the idea of ‘living a transition’ to postpositivism as fol-lows: For a long time, we have already been Cartesians. How, then, might we become what we currently experience this Cartesian inheritance to discourage us from actually being?15

This is obviously a decisive question. But while it complicates the task of explaining what a self-conscious approach to philosophy would look like, it does not obviate it. It does not free us from the responsibility of saying what Wilson, Taylor, and other weak postpositivists ought to be doing instead. When we criticize someone for performing an activity badly, we do so on the basis of some idea of what it would be like to perform that activity well. This idea might be implicit and unthematized, but it is what makes the criticism possible. Without it, we could not distinguish good instances of the activity from bad ones in the first place. So when Scharff criticizes Wilson and Taylor for being insufficiently aware of their historic-ity, he is doing so on the basis of some idea – perhaps an implicit, unthe-matized one – of what a sufficiently self-aware piece of philosophy would look like. Surely this idea can be made more explicit. It need not, and doubtless should not, be turned into “up-to-date Epistemological criteria” of the sort Descartes would favor. But in order to criticize a philosopher for not being self-aware, I must have some conception of what self-aware phi-losophy would look like. If this idea is definite enough to underwrite criti-cisms of others, it is definite enough to be articulated explicitly.16

What this shows is that vague pleas for self-awareness are not enough. If we are going to philosophize about historical consciousness – even if only by criticizing those who do not have enough of it – then we need to make explicit the basis of our critique. We need a more sustained account of

15) Scharff, “Weak Postpositivism,” 530–31.16) Scharff tries to avoid this charge by saying that he is not really criticizing the weak post-positivists. Rather, he says, “on the still unsatisfactorily answered question of overcoming an essentially Cartesian inheritance, I ‘stand’ with them” (“Weak Postpositivism,” 530). But such remarks are at odds with the harsh language he uses to describe the weak postpositiv-ists – as, for example, when he calls Margaret Wilson’s position “embarrassing” (517).


what historical consciousness demands. I would therefore like to turn to two philosophers who have given such accounts.

II

Richard Rorty’s book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature has quite a bit to say about historical consciousness. History is not the book’s main concern, however. Rorty’s goals are metaphilosophical: to explain what philosophy is, how it should understand its mission, and what it should not try to do. In raising these questions, however, Rorty is forced to confront the topic of historical change. “Philosophers,” Rorty says, “usually think of their disci-pline as one which discusses perennial, eternal problems – problems which arise as soon as one reflects.”17 These problems typically concern the foun-dations of our practices. Philosophers criticize and evaluate the claims made by religion, science, and other institutions, in order to “underwrite or debunk [their] claims to knowledge.”18 Philosophers consider them-selves qualified to do so because they think they understand knowledge in a way that others do not. Rorty describes their outlook as follows:

Philosophy can be foundational in respect to the rest of culture because cul-ture is the assemblage of claims to knowledge, and it finds these foundations in the study of man-as-knower, of the ‘mental processes’ or the ‘activity of representation’ which makes knowledge possible. To know is to represent accurately what is outside the mind; so to understand the possibility and nature of knowledge is to understand the way in which the mind is able to construct such representations. Philosophy’s central concern is to be a general theory of representation, a theory which will divide culture up into the areas which represent reality well, those which represent it less well, and those which do not represent it at all (despite their pretense of doing so).19

Rorty rejects this outlook.20 He thinks its key assumptions – that knowing involves representing a reality outside the mind, that some areas of culture

17) Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 3. My emphasis. 18) Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 3.19) Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 3.20) This is an oversimplification, since as Konstantin Kolenda points out, Rorty rarely


represent reality more accurately than others, and so on – are the contin-gent products of a specific historical development. The development in question is the dominance of a particular picture, an image or metaphor that shapes the way philosophers think. This picture is not a specific philo-sophical theory, but a much more general way of looking at reality. “The picture which holds traditional philosophy captive,” Rorty claims, “is that of the mind as a great mirror, containing various representations – some accurate, some not – and capable of being studied by pure, nonempirical methods.”21 Only if we assume that the mind is like a mirror will we think of knowledge claims as attempts to represent reality. Only if we divide these representations into the accurate and the inaccurate will we look for criteria for distinguishing the two, criteria that find expression in our phil-osophical theories of knowledge. And only if we assume that this mirror can be studied by “pure, nonempirical methods” will we assume that those who use such methods – philosophers – have any business sorting knowl-edge claims into the real and the spurious. In Rorty’s view, it is “pictures rather than propositions, metaphors rather than statements, which deter-mine most of our philosophical convictions.”22 We understand philosophy as we do because of the dominance of a specific metaphor.

Metaphors, however, are the contingent products of particular cultures. It is a historical accident that we think of the mind as a great mirror, knowledge claims as better or worse representations of reality. Once we recognize this, it is natural to take the philosophy erected on such a meta-phor less seriously. But the problem is not just that different ways of doing philosophy have contingent historical origins. If that were the case, phi-losophers could simply use reason to find the one best approach to phi-losophy, and then unanimously adopt it. The real problem, according to Rorty, is that there is no neutral language in which different ways of doing philosophy can be compared and assessed. Different approaches to phi-losophy have different ideas about what an approach to philosophy ought

rejects positions in the sense of claiming they are false. Rather, “his general strategy is prag-matic: don’t try to be deep; stay on the surface; and ask what real difference to the rest of our language and our practices would the introduction of a term or a theory make.” See Konstantin Kolenda, Rorty’s Humanistic Pragmatism: Philosophy Democratized (Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1990), 100. 21) Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 12.22) Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 12.


to do. They have different conceptions of what counts as an argument, let alone a good argument, and so they disagree about what it would take for one approach to vindicate itself against another. All of this makes dialogue between approaches futile, since “arguments against the use of a familiar and time-honored vocabulary . . . are expected to be phrased in that very vocabulary.”23 A representationalist philosopher – that is, one who is under the sway of the image of the mind as a great mirror – can give plenty of arguments showing that this approach to philosophy is the best one. These arguments, however, will articulate representationalist intuitions and meet representationalist criteria. To a non-representationalist, they will beg the question. Rorty therefore insists that when it comes to asking which approach to philosophy we ought to endorse, “the notions of criteria and choice (including that of ‘arbitrary’ choice) are no longer in point.”24

Rorty’s claim is that there is no “final vocabulary”25 shared by all phi-losophers, no meta-language in which all their ways of thinking might be adjudicated. He claims that the philosopher who recognizes this fact will become an ironist about her own way of doing philosophy. An ironist is someone who “has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered.”26 Indeed, the ironist is so impressed by the diversity of philosophical vocabularies that she stops trying to defend her own vocabulary with arguments. She “realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve” her doubts about it, and “insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others.”27 Rorty is not claiming that philosophical debates can never be

23) Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 8.24) Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 6. 25) Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 73.26) Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 73.27) Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 73. For obvious reasons, Rorty does not describe the ironist as having discovered something about philosophy. On pain of contra-dicting himself, Rorty must “avoid hinting that this suggestion gets something right, that my sort of philosophy corresponds to the way things really are.” See Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 8. Instead, Rorty describes himself as making a proposal – that is, as claiming that more traditional views of philosophy have grown unfruitful, and that his view would better serve our interests. For more on this point, see Alan Malachiwski, Richard Rorty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 114.


settled by appeals to argument. Within a given vocabulary, within a par-ticular approach to philosophy, arguments can and do settle disputes. But arguments cannot settle disputes between vocabularies. This is quite a challenge to philosophy’s traditional aspirations, and it requires a radical revision in our understanding of the discipline. Rorty’s proposal is that ironist philosophers should strive to be edifying. Rather than trying to show that their vocabulary is closer to reality than others, they should look for “new, better, more interesting, more fruitful ways of speaking.”28 By “thinking up . . . new aims, new words, or new disciplines,” edifying phi-losophers try to “reinterpret our familiar surroundings in the unfamiliar terms of our new inventions.”29 Rorty cites Dewey, Heidegger, and the later Wittgenstein as exemplary edifiers. Instead of “offering accurate rep-resentations of how things are,”30 they are content to “make fun of the classic picture of man,”31 and to look for new pictures that are more fruit-ful.32 Edifying philosophy does not take truth to be the end of inquiry. What makes a philosophical vocabulary good is not whether it articulates the truth, but whether it helps us talk in ways that advance our current interests. A good piece of philosophy aims “to keep the conversation going rather than to find objective truth.”33

So for Rorty, historical consciousness requires us to abandon philoso-phy’s traditional aspirations. When philosophers reflect on their historical

28) Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 360.29) Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 360.30) Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 370.31) Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 368. Rorty insists that edifying philosophy is not skeptical or relativistic, though it does not seek accurate representations of the way things are. Not surprisingly, however, he claims that accusations of skepticism and relativ-ism are unhelpful rather than false. Rorty claims that “the distinctions between absolutism and relativism, between rationality and irrationality, and between morality and expediency are obsolete and clumsy tools – remnants of a vocabulary we should try to replace.” See Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 44. Similarly, instead of refuting charges of relativ-ism, Rorty seeks “to make the vocabulary in which these objections are phrased look bad, thereby changing the subject” (44). 32) Rorty does not claim that more traditional philosophers have been uninterested in edi-fication. But in his view, they have generally assumed that “the only way to be edified is to know what is out there.” See Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 360. By contrast, Rorty argues that “the quest for truth is just one among many ways in which we might be edified” (360). 33) Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 377.


origins, they see that the way they do philosophy is decisively shaped by contingent metaphors. They see that different histories give rise to differ-ent metaphors, which in turn give rise to incommensurable philosophical vocabularies. Unable to adjudicate these in any final vocabulary, they adopt an ironic detachment toward all philosophical vocabularies, including their own. They stop trying to “use reason to discover how things really are,”34 focusing instead on the search for edifying ways of talking. For Rorty, in short, if philosophy is historically specific, then it is irreducibly plural. Historical diversity makes it possible to do philosophy in indefi-nitely many different ways, and we should have no illusions about bring-ing them together.

III

Ricoeur’s account of historical consciousness is starkly different. He agrees with Rorty that philosophical thinking is conditioned by contingent cul-tural factors, though he describes these factors somewhat differently. He most often does so in the language of tradition. A tradition, as Ricoeur understands it, is a “received heritage within the order of the symbolic,”35 consisting of the “things already said”36 in the past. Philosophers always find themselves situated in some tradition or other, and given “the una-voidable finitude of all understanding,”37 they cannot help but think as their tradition does, at least initially. “Taking a distance . . . regarding trans-mitted contents,” Ricoeur claims, “cannot be our initial attitude. Through tradition, we find ourselves already situated in an order of meaning and therefore also of possible truth.”38 Ricoeur also shares Rorty’s doubts about

34) Richard Rorty, “Grandeur, Profundity, and Finitude,” in Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, Volume 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 74. 35) Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Volume 3, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 227. 36) Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3, 221. Ricoeur actually distinguishes three different con-cepts associated with the term ‘tradition.’ Traditionality is his name for the “how” of our thinking, or our need to take our beginnings from the past. Traditions are particular cul-tural heritages that can offer such guidance. And a tradition is a cultural heritage that we deem legitimate. For a more detailed discussion of these concepts, see Time and Narrative 3, 216–29.37) Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3, 225.38) Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3, 223.


final vocabularies in which all traditions might be compared and assessed – though again, Ricoeur puts this point differently than Rorty. That said, Ricoeur clearly does not abandon truth as a goal of inquiry, and he clearly thinks that philosophers can do more than develop fruitful ways of talking. His own work contains ambitious reflections on the central topics of phi-losophy – freedom, morality, and politics, for example – and strives to articulate the truth about these topics. Ricoeur is historically conscious, but he also has all the ambitions of a traditional philosopher. Why? Why does Ricoeur think he can accept several of Rorty’s key premises but reject his conclusions?

Ricoeur’s views on this matter appear in Volume Three of Time and Nar-rative, in his discussion of the “hermeneutics of historical consciousness.”39 This discussion grows out the book’s larger project. Time and Narrative argues that time is an essentially aporetic phenomenon, one that defies our attempts to construct a coherent theory about it. But we humanize time, to the extent that we can, by telling stories, situating events in plots with beginnings, middles, and ends. Matters are complicated by the fact that we can construct different sorts of narratives, notably historical and fictional ones. This bifurcation challenges our assumptions about “the oneness of time,” our tendency to think of time “a singular collective.”40 Ricoeur does claim that there is an “interweaving of history and fiction in the refigura-tion of time.”41 But how complete can we expect this interweaving to be? Or as Ricoeur asks: “To what kind of totalization does this time, issuing from the refiguration through narrative, lend itself, if this time has to be considered as the collective singular reality that groups together all the procedures of interweaving?”42 Can reason perhaps make time into a sin-gular collective by “grasping history as the totalization of time in the eter-nal present?”43 Despite obvious differences in vocabulary, Ricoeur is asking the same basic question as Rorty: to what extent can we reconcile the dif-ferent perspectives we can adopt on ourselves and our thinking? Historical consciousness shows that these different perspectives exist; it reveals us to be both the inhabitants of our practices and detached observers of their

39) Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3, 207. 40) Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3, 193.41) Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3, 192.42) Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3, 192.43) Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3, 193.


historical genesis. Can we bring these perspectives together? Can we, for example, find some single perspective that unifies all other perspectives in a totality?

The desire to totalize perspectives in this way is what Ricoeur calls “the Hegelian temptation.”44 He claims that totalization of this sort is impos-sible, and that there is “no Aufhebung into a totality where reason in history and its reality would coincide.”45 Ricoeur gives several reasons for renounc-ing this ambition. He rejects the Hegelian conception of an “eternal present” – that is, “the capacity of the actual present to retain the known past and anticipate the future indicated in the tendencies of the past. The self-understanding that goes with historical awareness,” Ricoeur claims, “is born precisely from the unescapable fact of [the] difference” of past, present, and future perspectives on ourselves.46 Ricoeur also rejects Hegel’s understanding of “the ‘material’ of the realization of the Spirit.”47 He claims that neither the state nor historical actors are what they would have to be in order for Hegel’s approach to history to be viable.48 Above all, most philosophers no longer find plausible the project of writing “a philosophi-cal history of the world” in accordance with one guiding idea, the “realiza-tion of the Spirit in history.”49 For Ricoeur, it is just a fact that “we have abandoned… Hegel’s work site. We no longer seek the basis upon which the history of the world may be thought of as a completed whole.”50 For Ricoeur, as for Rorty, exhaustively mediating our vocabularies in some final vocabulary is not an option.

But this does not mean we cannot mediate them at all. That would fol-low only if “the idea of a ‘total mediation’ were to exhaust the field of

44) Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3, 193.45) Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3, 207.46) Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3, 204.47) Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3, 204.48) More specifically, Ricoeur argues that in the twentieth century, “we have seen Europe’s claim to totalize the history of the world come undone. We have even seen the heritages it tried to integrate in terms of one guiding idea come undone.” Likewise, we no longer find it plausible to think of history as driven largely by “the passion of the great men of his-tory . . . As the emphasis on political history wanes, it is the great anonymous forces of his-tory that hold our attention.” See Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3, 205.49) Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3, 205.50) Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3, 205.


thought.51 Ricoeur claims that a less ambitious sort of mediation remains possible: “an open-ended, incomplete, imperfect mediation” involving “a network of interweaving perspectives.”52 This interweaving is rooted in the present, but not a Hegelian eternal present that combines all other per-spectives in a totality. It is the present conceived as the time in which we act, and moreover, act in a way that is essentially linked to both past and future. Ricoeur calls such a present the “time of initiative,”53 where “initia-tive” is defined as “an intervention of the agent of action in the course of the world, an intervention which effectively causes changes in the world.”54 This intervention looks toward both the future and the past. I act in order to bring about some future state of affairs, and I always act within a certain “horizon of expectations”55 about this future. At the same time, my actions are always affected by the past. I act in circumstances I have not made, and the possibilities I seek to realize through acting are ones I inherit from tradition. Even the possibility of breaking with the past is one that I draw from the past.56 Past and future are linked in the present, since the present is both “the time when the weight of history that has already been made is deposited, suspended, and interrupted,” and the point at which “the dream of history yet to be made is transposed into a responsible decision.”57 The present, understood as the time of initiative, links past and future in a “pluralistic unity.”58 This unification is partial and incomplete. I have lim-ited abilities to understand the past and anticipate the future, and so my

51) Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3, 207. 52) Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3, 207.53) Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3, 208.54) Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chi-cago Press, 1992), 109.55) Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3, 208. Ricoeur borrows the term “horizon of expecta-tions” from Reinhart Koselleck.56) Or as Ricoeur puts it, “there would be no interest in emancipation, no more anticipa-tion of freedom, if the Exodus and the Resurrection were effaced from the memory of mankind.” See Paul Ricoeur, “Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology,” in From Text to Action, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John Thompson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univer-sity Press, 1991), 306.57) Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3, 208. David Wood argues that this unification is even less complete than it first appears. See David Wood, “Time-Shelters: An Essay in the Poetics of Time,” in Time After Time (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 24–36.58) Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3, 207.


actions can bring the three together in only a very imperfect way. But I can unify them to some extent, “within the dimension of acting.”59

What does such unification look like? What is involved in interweaving past, present, and future in the dimension of acting? Ricoeur’s own philo-sophical practice offers an example. One of the most striking features of the contemporary philosophical landscape is its fragmentation: the exist-ence of many different ways of doing philosophy, many rival methodolo-gies, schools, and traditions. It is far from clear which ways of doing philosophy deserve our loyalty and which do not. The present philosophi-cal situation – or as Ricoeur would say, contemporary philosophy’s time of initiative – is one in which many fragments from the history of philosophy vie for our attention, and many possible ways of moving forward lie before us. Given all of this, how might contemporary thinkers try to interweave past, present, and future in their own philosophical activity? Ricoeur tries to do so by adopting an approach to philosophy that he calls his post-Hegelian Kantianism.60 It is rooted in Ricoeur’s conviction that the most important historical resources available to contemporary thought are the philosophies of Kant and Hegel. It is also rooted in a belief that each of these philosophers offers something indispensable but one-sided, and that the best way to respond to this fact is “to think them always better by thinking them together – one against the other, and one by means of the other.”61 When Ricoeur tackles a contemporary philosophical problem, he generally does so in a way that draws on both Kant and Hegel, and more specifically, in a way that approaches the problem from three successive standpoints. The first standpoint – which Ricoeur sees at work in the “ana-lytical” portions of the first two Critiques – is a sensitivity to the dualisms

59) Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3, 208. Perhaps the clearest example of such unification appears in the act of promising. See Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 123–124. See also Paul Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, trans. David Pellauer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-versity Press, 2005), 127–34.60) A longer discussion of Ricoeur’s post-Hegelian Kantianism appears in chapter six of my book The Uses of the Past From Heidegger to Rorty: Doing Philosophy Historically (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). I also discuss this topic in the following articles: “What is a Post-Hegelian Kantian? The Case of Paul Ricoeur,” in Philosophy Today 51:1 (Spring 2007), 26–38; and “How Paul Ricoeur Changed the World,” in American Catholic Philo-sophical Quarterly 82:3 (Summer 2008), 463–480.61) Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations, ed. Don Ihde (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 412.


and oppositions in human experience: phenomena versus noumena, duty versus inclination, and so on. The second, more “Hegelian” standpoint, seeks to overcome such oppositions by grasping them dialectically – that is, by seeing their poles as moments of fluid processes rather than as brute givens. The third standpoint, which Ricoeur associates with the Kant of the Transcendental Dialectic, involves a higher-order recognition that our ability to overcome dualisms is sharply limited and in need of constant criticism. According to Ricoeur, we should try to transcend oppositions through dialectical thinking, but we must always be open to the possibility that the objects of such thinking are ideal limits rather than something of which we can acquire positive knowledge. In his philosophizing, Ricoeur strives to approach contemporary problems from each of these standpoints in turn.

An example might help here. As I have argued elsewhere,62 Ricoeur’s reflections on God are a particularly good example of his post-Hegelian Kantianism. In his writings on God, Ricoeur is not just interested in the scholarly question of how earlier thinkers understood this topic. He is interested in finding the right account of this topic, an account that shows how one ought to think about God today. But in seeking such an account, he is careful to approach the topic of God from each of the three stand-points mentioned above. First, Ricoeur notes that thinking about God invariably involves dualisms and oppositions. In particular, he accepts Kant’s claim that the idea of God plays radically different roles for theo-retical reason and for practical reason. He also claims that religious believ-ers such as himself can find themselves torn between a purely philosophical approach to this idea and an approach rooted in their particular faith tradi-tions. Second, Ricoeur expresses a wish to overcome these oppositions and dualisms to the extent that he can. Taking a cue from Hegel,63 he suggests that we can transcend some of these dualisms if we understand the idea of God concretely – that is, using the symbolic resources of some particular religious tradition. Our reflections on God, he claims, must be “linked in a contingent way to individual events and particular texts that report them.”64 But Ricoeur insists that while these reflections must be concrete,

62) See The Uses of the Past From Heidegger to Rorty, 192–202.63) Most relevant here are Hegel’s early writings on theology, such as his essay “The Positiv-ity of the Christian Religion.”64) Paul Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, trans. David Pellauer, ed. Mark Wallace (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 217.


they must not be totalizing. They must not be needlessly dualistic, but neither can they hope to transcend dualisms and tensions altogether. Though Ricoeur stresses the need for concrete religious narratives, he finds most valuable those narratives that emphasize God’s unknowability. The story of the burning bush, for example, presents God as “the being whom humanity cannot really name, that is, hold at the mercy of our language.”65 Likewise, the proverbs and parables found in many religious traditions are valuable precisely because “no literal translation can exhaust their meaning.”66 For Ricoeur, reflecting on the idea of God is not a matter of endorsing one of the three standpoints and rejecting the others. It is a mat-ter of engaging in all of them and striving to hold them in balance.

I am not suggesting that we should accept all – or any – of the details of Ricoeur’s reflections on God. But his approach to this topic helps show how one might interweave past, present, and future in the time of initia-tive. Ricoeur’s focus is on the present. His goal is to contribute to contem-porary philosophy by making suggestions about how the topic of God should be approached today. But while he wants to do more than clarify the views of earlier thinkers, he insists that the only way to start doing so is to take up resources from the past. These resources are fragmentary and in tension with each other, and none can be endorsed without qualifica-tion. They are best seen not as doctrines, but as styles of thinking, ways of approaching problems. Nevertheless, Ricoeur hopes that by interweaving these resources with an eye to the current state of philosophy, he can open up a future and provide a starting point for later discussions. The inter-weaving in which Ricoeur engages is partial and incomplete, as he warns it must be. It does not dissolve all the tensions involved in thinking philo-sophically about God. But at the very least, it helps show what it is like to bring together past, present, and future in the sphere of action.

IV

What does all of this have to do with historical consciousness, or with Rorty? It might seem that Rorty and Ricoeur are talking about different things. Rorty is talking about philosophical vocabularies; Ricoeur is talk-ing about time. But Rorty and Ricoeur are responding to the same basic

65) Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 228.66) Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 229.


worry: namely, what to make of the fact that recognizing our historicity fragments our self-image, making it possible to see ourselves from several different perspectives. For Rorty, the perspectives in question are the vari-ous vocabularies that emerge from contingent metaphors and cultural developments. For Ricoeur, they are the different temporal perspectives we adopt on our own thinking. Once we become historically self-aware, we must view our thinking as an activity we perform in the present, and as the product of a specific cultural heritage, and as an opening to yet-unrealized possibilities. Both Rorty and Ricoeur want to know what this fragmenta-tion does to philosophy. For Rorty, it marks the end of traditional philoso-phy. He thinks that since different vocabularies are rooted in different histories, they are incommensurable, and there can be no question of find-ing the right one. Ricoeur does not think this pessimistic conclusion fol-lows. Historical consciousness does fragment us, but the fragments come together in a partial unity in the time of initiative. In acting, I interweave past, present, and future. I bring them together in an incomplete, open-ended structure, a structure in which my present actions bear the weight of the past and open up an anticipated future. It is striking that this unity seems to involve what Ricoeur calls narrative identity – that is, the identity that binds together the different episodes of a story. When I act, I enact a sort of plot, and the past, present, and future aspects of my being are linked by virtue of the positions they occupy in this plot. This plot, like any plot, is compatible with diversity. The unity possessed by a story is precisely a “dynamic identity arising from the poetic composition of a nar-rative text,” a unity that “can include change, mutability, within the cohe-sion of one lifetime.”67 To describe this kind of unity, and to distinguish it from another kind, Ricoeur coins two terms. The first, idem-identity, refers to sameness or lack of differentiation. A thing possesses idem-identity to the extent that it does not change over time. The other, ipse-identity, is the

67) Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3, 246. One might object that the pluralistic unity of past, present, and future should not be likened to narrative, since narratives describe only the past. In response, Ricoeur points out that “narrative voice… can place itself at any point in time, which becomes for it a quasi-present, and, from this observation point, it can appre-hend as a quasi-past the future of our present. In this way, a narrative past, which is the past of the narrative voice, is assigned to this quasi-present.” Our anticipations of the future, for example, may be considered “anticipated retrospections,” and thus as episodes in a narra-tive. See Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3, 260.


sort of identity attributed to selves and to narratives. A self has a certain unity over the course of its life, but this unity “implies no assertion con-cerning some unchanging core of personality.”68 It is an identity in differ-ence, or “identity understood in the sense of oneself as self-same.”69 Similarly, every story is unified, but not in the sense of displaying an undif-ferentiated sameness. It possesses the kind of identity that results when different episodes are woven together into a single plot. This is the sort of identity I bring about by interweaving past, present, and future in my actions. It is “not a stable and seamless identity.”70 It is something I create, to the extent that I can. But it is no less real for being fragile and created. And it gives us a way of responding to the fragmentation caused by his-torical consciousness.

But why is Ricoeur willing to invoke this sort of unity while Rorty is not? There are probably several reasons. One seems to be Rorty’s holistic view of vocabularies. If one sees vocabularies as self-contained wholes that share nothing, it is hard to imagine any common ground on which they might move closer together. Another reason seems to be Rorty’s rejection of anything like a pre-linguistic objective reality. Rorty has no use for “the notions of ‘the intrinsic nature of reality’ and ‘correspondence to reality,’”71 and so he can make no sense of the suggestion that different vocabularies might be nudged closer together by the nature of things. But I suspect that part of the explanation has to do with Rorty’s understanding of the con-cept of identity. As I have argued, Ricoeur allows for two distinct types of identity, idem-identity and ipse-identity. One sort is found in the sameness of things that do not change, while another is found in human lives and actions. Rorty does not seem to have any use for ipse-identity.72 At the very least, he does not seem to think that the unity of a tradition or a history might be more like the identity displayed by persons than the sameness

68) Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 2.69) Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3, 246.70) Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3, 248.71) Richard Rorty, “Introduction,” in Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 2. 72) To say that Rorty has no use for this concept is not to say that he is unaware of it. He is obviously aware of the claim that persons possess a different sort of identity than do most other entities. For example, he is obviously aware of Locke’s theory of personal identity. But as far as I can tell, he does not make use of this sort of identity in his own work, and he certainly does not predicate it of histories and traditions in the way Ricoeur does.


possessed by things that do not change. He is therefore driven to what Ricoeur calls an “antinomy between discontinuity and continuity in history.”73 For Rorty, it seems, our self-image is either unified or it is not. There is no third option, no pluralistic unity-in-diversity of the sort Ricoeur describes. This all-or-nothing view of identity leads to an equally all-or-nothing view of commensuration: philosophical vocabularies are either wholly the same or wholly unbridgeable. Defenses of these vocabularies are either phrased in terms of them (and thus question-begging) or not (and thus unintelligible). That we might bring about an incomplete but real identity by acting is something Rorty will not allow.74

I suspect that Rorty’s allergy to ipse-identity has something to do with a lingering naturalistic assumption in his work: namely, the assumption that what is constituted through human thought is not really real. At first, this suggestion sounds absurd, since Rorty has no use for such notions as “really real.” He has nothing but contempt for those “hick logocentrists who still think that some things or properties (the ‘natural’ and ‘real’ ones as opposed to the ‘cultural’ and ‘artificial’ ones) are what they are apart from . . . [their] relations to other things.”75 Similarly, he dismisses as “naifs” those who are “still susceptible to the line of patter which we antiessentialist philosophers have developed. (‘Ha! Fooled you! You thought it was real, but it’s only a

73) Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3, 217.74) Matters are more complex than I have suggested here. Rorty sometimes claims that edifying philosophy is based on the hope that currently incommensurable vocabularies will one day be reconciled, if only the conversation keeps going in the right ways. In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, he praises the sort of conversation that “presupposes no disciplin-ary matrix which unites the speakers, but where the hope of agreement is never lost so long as the conversation lasts” (318). This “hope of agreement” between different speakers resembles the pluralistic unity that Ricoeur’s agent seeks to bring about in the time of initia-tive. An important difference is that for Rorty, the hope of eventual agreement is “simply hope,” and those who share it are “united by civility rather than by a common goal, much less by a common ground” (318). In other words, Rorty’s hope is not supported by reasons. While Rorty leaves open the possibility of agreement, he does not tell us when we are justi-fied in expecting it, let alone how to bring it about. All we can do is talk and hope for the best. Rorty’s groundless hope would appear unacceptably vague to Ricoeur, who demands that “the utopian imagination always be converted into specific expectations” (Time and Narrative 3, 258).75) Richard Rorty, “A Specter is Haunting the Intellectuals: Derrida on Marx,” in Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin, 1999), 216.


social construct!’).”76 Nevertheless, Rorty sometimes displays a tendency to see the products of thought as ontologically not on all fours with the other inhabitants of our “world of atoms and voids.”77 Consider his frequent warnings about “treating concepts as agents or subjects.”78 Since ipse-identity is predicated in the first instance of agents or subjects, it would not be surprising if Rorty were unwilling to predicate it of histories or traditions, as Ricoeur does. Consider as well his naturalistic approach to explanation. Naturalism, Rorty says, is “the view that anything might have been other-wise, that there can be no conditionless conditions. Naturalists believe that all explanation is causal explanation of the actual, and that there is no such thing as a noncausal condition of possibility.”79 It would not be surprising if Rorty were reluctant to explain the unity of histories and traditions by appealing to notions such as ipse-identity. Granted, Rorty sometimes criti-cizes particular naturalistic moves, and he criticizes those who draw an overly sharp distinction between the natural and the socially constructed. But the general tendency of his work is overwhelmingly naturalistic, so it is not surprising that he has little use for ipse-identity. As useful as this concept is, it is clearly much more at home in an anti-naturalistic philoso-phy such as Ricoeur’s.

I began this essay with a question: what should philosophers do in response to historical consciousness? I would like to conclude with a sug-gestion about what we need not do. Historical consciousness does not require us to abandon all talk of the goals and the methods of philosophy. It does not force us to view philosophy as irreparably fragmented. If Ricoeur’s claims are anywhere near right, we can take historical conscious-ness seriously and still see philosophy as a continuous and coherently developing enterprise. In order to do so, however, we must be willing to make certain changes to our conceptual toolboxes. Above all, we must be

76) Rorty, “A Specter is Haunting the Intellectuals,” 217. In the same passage, Rorty claims that the antiessentialist patter has been so successful that the naturalistic naifs are becoming quite thin on the ground: “There is not, in fact, much naivety left these days. Tell a sopho-more at an American college that something is only a social construct, and she is likely to reply, ‘Yeah, I know. So are you, Mac’” (217).77) Richard Rorty, “Derrida and the Philosophical Tradition,” in Truth and Progress, 330.78) Rorty, “Derrida and the Philosophical Tradition,” 331.79) Richard Rorty, “Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Reification of Language,” in Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 55.


willing to rethink the concept of identity. Historical consciousness chal-lenges us to bring together a variety of perspectives on ourselves and our thinking. We can face this challenge successfully only if we see these per-spectives as unified in their undeniable multiplicity. In other words, we must see ourselves and our thinking as possessing an identity that is com-patible with extreme diversity, and that may even demand such diversity. Idem-identity is not up to this task. Ipse-identity may be. Privileging ipse-identity in this sphere comes at a price, since as Ricoeur acknowledges, it “gives preference to the plural at the expense of the collective singular.”80 But giving preference to the plural is not the same as abandoning identity altogether. Just as important, we must rethink the naturalistic mindset that tempts us to see identity as no more than sameness, and to assume that a unity brought about in the practical sphere is less real than one grasped in the cognitive sphere. Historical consciousness is much less threatening when viewed in the context of a human reality – the very reality that phe-nomenological and hermeneutical philosophers such as Ricoeur seek to describe. A restrictive naturalism may be the real obstacle to putting the historical Humpty Dumpty together again.81

80) Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3, 259. 81) I am grateful to Frank Ankersmit and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful com-ments on an earlier version of this essay. A somewhat different version of the essay was presented at the XXII World Congress of Philosophy in Seoul, South Korea.

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