draft: on paul ricoeur's poetics of the will

On Paul Ricoeur’s Poetics of the Will

By Randolph Dible

“Poetry is more than the art of making poems. It is poiesis, or creation in the largest sense of the word. It is in this sense that poetry is equivalent to primordial dwelling; man dwells only when poets exist in the world.”1 -Paul Ricoeur

Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) is a philosopher whose works spanned some of the most

disparate fields of knowledge in recent hermeneutic philosophy in his quest for the

meaning of being. Throughout his career he has contributed to numerous topics of

philosophical interest, often changing his methodology and style of presentation to match

the contents. His technique of ‘distanciation’ (investigating the context to understand a

particular text) accounted for an apparent disparity despite an actual continuity of the

most grand themes. In his early opus, The Philosophy of the Will, for instance, he begins

with a descriptive style to present the essence of the phenomena of the will in Volume

One, and continues on to a decryptive, hermeneutic style concerning the empirical facts

of the will in Volume Two, and throughout these volumes he foreshadows the projected

style and content of the unwritten third volume, the Poetics of the Will. Later, in an

altogether different study, The Rule of Metaphor, and again in Oneself as Another, the

religious theme becomes latent while the word and its expression, and the constitution of

the self comes to the forefront, continuing previous analyses in wholly new contexts.

Ricoeur is famous for saying “Le symbole donner a penser,”2 the symbol gives rise

to thought. He left his most intricate work undone in that he never wrote an authentic

volume three to his early magnum opus La Philosophie de la volonte, the Philosophy of

1 Conflict of Interpretations, pp. 467.

2 Cf. Freud and Philosophy, pp. 38 (a phrase he takes from Kant’s Critique of Judgment).

the Will. Without going against Ricoeur’s own criteriology of symbols as it developed

both in Symbolism of Evil and throughout his career, one may chose to view all forms of

human experience as being comprised of symbols of various degrees. These degrees

include universal ‘primary symbols,’ ‘symbols of the second degree’ when arranged in

narrative order, and ‘symbols of the third degree’ applies to conceptual or rational

symbols. Such is the substance of the hermeneutic phenomenology he is famous for

developing.

Symbols are open to interpretation and provoke an immediate interpretation.

Whereas words are a species of symbols whose designations are limited by their

definitions, symbols generally construed are open to indefinitely many possibilities,

depending on the freedom of poetic license. Ricoeur writes, “No doubt a symbol is, in

the Greek sense of the word, an ‘enigma,’ but as Heraclitus says, ‘The Master whose

oracle is at Delphi does not speak, does not dissimulate; he signifies.’ ...Enigma does not

block understanding but provokes it; there is something to unfold, to dis-implicate in

symbols.”3

More than provoking understanding en masse, the Poetics of the Will was intended

to provoke an immanent ethical conduct through what he called “the genesis of desire.”4

In contrast to the abstract mentality of the moral dictation of duty found in Kantian

ethical maxims, the ethics of Ricoeur promises, through hope, a completion, a fulfillment

in an object for desire: “The abstract problem of formalism yields to the concrete problem

of the genesis of desire. The genesis of desire, this ‘poetics of the will,’ is what faith

3 Freud and Philosophy, pp. 18, and Conflict of Interpretations, pp. 296.

4 Conflict of Interpretations, pp. 346-347.

yields for understanding in the symbol of the new man and in all the symbols of the

second birth and regeneration, which we must now reappropriate, beyond every

moralizing allegorism, in their primordial power.”5 The specific symbols of the ‘new

man’ and the ‘second birth and regeneration’ are to be taken from the symbol of Christ,

but abstracted from the symbol of Christ, which has become thoroughly sedimented into

an idol by Christianity, and was in the first place itself taken from the symbol of its

antitype in Adam, by the first Christian theologian, St. Paul. The symbolic significance

of Adam, in turn, is that he was created in ‘imago Dei,’ in the image of the ultimate

symbol, God. Ricoeur is interested in revitalizing not only religious sentiments, but

philosophy itself. We, human kind, may be treated as our own primary symbols, under

the designation ‘Man’ for instance, as St. Paul intended when he declared that it is “in

Adam” that we collectively have sinned. But under other designations, such as ‘people’,

‘individuals’, ‘one’ and ‘being’ we encounter our other primary significations, as well as

their implied matrices of significatory schemata. Our ontological significance as beings

can be appreciated through the sympathetic participation in myths, through the mediation

of myths, and their ultimate critical demythologization (the baptism of the fire of critical

reflection), opening the being that we are to fresh realization of the meaning of being.

Poetics is the medium for truly fresh critical reinterpretation of symbolic powers through

semantic innovation. We will also be looking at how this sense of poetics as a ‘genesis of

desire’ can come out of the ‘semantics of desire’ developed in Freud and Philosophy.6

The key intention of this essay may now be put more clearly, since it has been

5 Conflict of Interpretations, pp. 346 - 347.

6 Freud and Philosophy, c.f. pp. 322.

shown that Ricoeur intended to create, in the Biblical sense, but also in philosophical

form, a new poem of creation and revelation, drawing its symbolic power for good from

the existent materials of the Philosophy of the Will, which articulated the diabolic powers

of the depths of the phenomenology of confession through the symbolization of evil. For

instance, Ricoeur says, “One can suppose that the symbolism of evil is always the

contrary of a symbolism of the good or salvation or that a symbolism of salvation is the

counterpart of a symbolism of evil.”7 The orientation of the imaginary forms is of

secondary significance. If we can imagine a good creation and a drama of a fall from

grace, we can just as well imagine an end to be feared and an ascension from disgrace

back into blessedness: “Imaginative projection is only one means and one stage of the

giving of a worldly form to the beyond in terms of the here and now.”8 Ricoeur

acknowledges that the semantics of the imagination of possible being is not limited to

mere fantasy, but includes science, whose models are themselves metaphors, shorthand

for paradigms of functional parameters, organized in narrative, mythical form, because

ultimately all imaginal form is derived from empirical experience starting with the body

and its concrete environs. Within the the different levels of interpretation “semantically

as well as mythically, the symbols of evil are always the obverse side of a greater

symbolism, a symbolism of salvation.”9 Symbolism of Evil performed an exegesis of the

myths of evil, an exegesis which left a task for the philosopher who participated in it and

was thereby able to perform his or her own higher-order exegesis, which this time may be



9 Freud and Philosophy, pp. 39.

oriented toward the transcendence of evil. The Poetics of the Will was to be more than a

post-Biblical Genesis, it was to be a philosophical and revolutionary primordial poetry of

transcendence. This leads one to speculate as to its form. The mystery of the the

unwritten third volume donates such speculation, and the space is somewhat structured

by the preceding structure of the project, but leaves much to the imagination. In addition

to supplying what inklings of reference to this project that was welling up in the young

Ricoeur’s ambitious heart, I will be supplying my own speculative and necessarily

creative reconstructions of this form, in harmony with the proposed ‘second Copernical

revolution’ and ‘post-critical naivete’ he sought to incite. The result is proposed to be a

preliminary imagining of what Ricoeur might have included in his unwritten Poetics of

the Will.

Volume I: Freedom and Nature

The first volume of the Philosophy of the Will published in 1950, is called Le

Volontaire et l’involontarie, (in English; Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the

Involuntary). The Second Volume of the Philosophy of the Will was published in 1960,

and is collectively referred to as Finitude et culpabilite. It was published jointly in two

parts; L’Homme Fallible (in English; Fallible Man), and La Symbolique du mal

(Symbolism of Evil). After looking to Freedom and Nature for the foreshadowing of the

Poetics of the Will, we shall use the indications at the conclusion of Fallible Man as a

straight arrow to the Poetics informed by a more explosive but enfolded, crooked arrow

of references to the ultimate diabolic symbol ‘the Evil Infinite’ at the heart of Symbolism

of Evil, whose zig-zag structure of references to ‘the Evil Infinite’ we shall re-write

backwards in a reading of its converse, sometimes called ‘originary affirmation,’ ‘the

objectival synthesis,’ or ‘the surplus of meaning’, for our structure of Transcendence.

The first volume is an application of phenomenology to the fundamental functions

of the will; choice and decision, motivation and action, consent and refusal. It is an

‘eidetic’ analysis, in Husserl’s sense: an intentional analysis which defers existential

considerations in order to discern the essential (eidetic) description of the form of man’s

fundamental possibilities. In each of the primary functions of the will the voluntary and

the involuntary aspects of the will are discovered to be mutually limiting. Decision is

limited by involuntary motivations, action by the means beginning with the body and the

habits of nature, and even consent is found to be limited by ‘the absolute involuntary’ of

existence and its priority over the phenomena of the will, namely by the fact that I did not

will myself into existence.

A key to Ricoeur’s investigation can be found already in Freedom and Nature in the

chapter on decision and motivation, where he projects to discern “a philosophy of value”

which entails “an ethic”10 which leads to his questioning, “How can we trace the ultimate

tangents of reference, and what does ‘ultimate’ mean? Anxiety about the ground of value

seizes me; for the question ‘what does ultimate mean?’ inevitably leads to another- ‘is

there an ultimate in value?’... The Grund becomes Abgrund.”11 In certain essays

collected after the publication of the extant Philosophy of the Will, collected in Conflict of

Interpretations, also found in Freud and Philosophy12, Ricoeur expresses a

10 Freedom and Nature, pp. 66.



‘fundamental’ or ‘originary ethics’13 which we will look at later. In Freud and

Philosophy, Ricoeur focus upon a ‘semantics of desire’14 in relation to the ‘Evil Infinite’

at the heart of Symbolism of Evil and the end of Fallible Man about the Adamic myth’s

‘drama of temptation,’ and the Kierkegaardian vertigo which implies “the Evil Infinite,” a

reification and deification of the Pascalian “bad infinity” of desire. This is another

connection we will be looking at very closely for a key point of conversion towards the

Poetics.

Our next key contextualization of the Poetics of the Will arrives in the context later

developed further in “The Hermeneutics of Symbols”15 about Fichte’s first truth, the

‘thetic judgment:’ “I am, I think.” In Freedom and Nature, Ricoeur, like Gabriel Marcel,

Merleau-Ponty, and Karl Jaspers, among other continental philosophers, struggles with

the Cartesian dualism which we still think in terms of, if not ontologically, then

semantically, in the problem of embodied consciousness. Ricoeur clarifies that there is “a

chain of cogitos which constitute the reflective tradition.”16 The Cartesian, he says, is

“only one of the summits- even if the highest” of them.17 There he refers to the Socratic

cogito (“Look after your soul”), the Augustinian cogito (the “inner” man distinct from the

flux of “external” things and “higher” truths), and the Kantian cogito. “The Fichtean

“Self” is, without any doubt, the most significant instance of modern reflective





17 Ibid.

philosophy; as Jean Nabert remarked, there is no contemporary reflective philosophy

which does not reinterpret Descartes through Kant and Fichte. And the “egology” that

Husserl later attempted to graft onto phenomenology belongs to this line.”18 In Freedom

and Nature, Ricoeur places the proposed Poetics of the Will in this context of progressing

beyond Descartes:

The ultimate consequence of the Cartesian revolution seems to us to lie here, in the

discovery that the originality of consciousness with respect to all objectively

conceived nature is such that no cosmology can any longer engulf this

consciousness. The ‘Poetics’ of the will can hereafter rediscover the desire for God

only thanks to a second revolution which breaks through the limits of subjectivity,

as the latter had broken through the limits of natural objectivity.19

This second revolution he calls ‘Copernican’ because from within the Cartesian

revolution (that is, after it), superadded to it, the Cartesian deduction is subtracted while

its truth remains in the form the Fichtean “Self.” But the empirical deduction of the “I

am” from the activity of mediating thought is displaced, just as the earth was displaced in

the Copernican revolution, to make way for a necessary yet enigmatically impossible

transcendental deduction of the “I am,” of a subjectival synthesis, deduced from the

necessity of a superjectival synthesis beyond any totality of existence, and thereby goes

from center to cipher.

What Ricoeur, following Malebranche, and contrary to Descartes, adds to the

Fichtean first truth, the ‘thetic judgment,’ and so to reflective philosophy in general, is the

18 Ibid.


recognition that the “I think, I am” is posited as a feeling. “I am, I think” is naively

thought to be deduced from the mediating thoughts of reflection on representations of

objects as a corollary apperception of a subject, but this is only a feeling, not an idea

which would be understood essentially in terms of light and vision. It is not an intuition

concerning a substantial soul, and it is not self-knowledge. Rather, “The first truth—I

think, I am—remains as abstract and empty as it is unassailable. It must be ‘mediated’ by

representations, actions, works, institutions, and monuments which objectify it; it is in

these objects, in the largest sense of the word, that the ego must both lose itself and find

itself.”20

In the following selection, Ricoeur reaches beyond the nostalgic feelings of one’s

own birth and prehistory in his explanation of the Platonic doctrine of recollection by

proceeding through the primary structures of the absolute involuntary; beyond the given

character, beyond the given unconscious, and beyond one’s own prehistory. This he later

calls “a renewal of the [Platonic] theory of recollection.”21 He says that men are “born

into the heart of language within the light of the Logos” and we can reach back to this

birth through “a renewal of the ancient doctrine of recollection.”22 He proposes that it is

through the interpretation of the symbolism of the sacred that we will reach the source of

knowledge, Eros, the ‘desire to be.’ This is how we will overcome our forgetfulness of

the Sacred and bring about its recollection or manifestation, through hermeneutics.23 For



22 Ibid, pp. 322.

23 Cf. “The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection” 1 and 2, Conflict of Interpretations, pp. 287 – 334.

this, we are required to go more into the philosophical expression of this as what he calls

a fundamental or ‘originary ethics.’ In the following selection, Ricoeur characterizes the

Poetics in terms of the Platonic doctrine of recollection:

This beginning which escapes memory, which is not rationally conceivable, which

biology hides in the success of generations, this beginning must finally be

suggested at the heart of consciousness as the fleeting limit beyond my oldest

memories…. There are beginnings which are always immanent, which is the

beginning of freedom: it is my beginning as act. And there is a beginning which

always precedes, the beginning of life: it is my beginning as a state.... As birth, all

necessity is prior to any actual act of the ‘I’ which reflects on itself. The ‘I’ is at the

same time older and younger than itself. This is the paradox of birth and

freedom.... Innateness of knowledge, according to Plato, is attested in the myth of

prior life, of reminiscence. The non-temporal nature of intelligible character

according to Kant expresses itself as a choice of myself prior to my life; finally,

Divine Omnipotence, which is like a transcendent beginning, is the primordial past

of predestination. This will be one of the themes of the Poetics of the Will.24

Ricoeur begins Freedom and Nature with a description of the method he will

employ, including, lastly, the bracketing of the phenomena of the fault for this eidetic

analysis of the functions of the human will, as well as the bracketing of the converse

notion of transcendence. We are returning to the beginning to recall that this has been

bracketed in this study, and that after we finish analyzing the end of Freedom and Nature,

24 Freedom and Nature, pp. 441-442, n. 99.

we will be removing the brackets and delving into the fault in Fallible Man:

The fault is an event with immense possibilities. At its outer limits it is a discovery

of the infinite, an experience of the holy in reverse, of the holy in the demonic; it is

sin in the strongest sense of the word…. It is related to God, it is before God, going

beyond subjectivity by its very excess. Only later, among the fruits of the Spirit,

can harmony be presented as a new ethic.25

The discovery of the infinite is articulated in myth of The Fall, as we shall see when we

look at the Adamic myth in our analysis of Symbolism of Evil. The ‘Evil Infinite’, or the

false infinite, shows itself in the myth as the wrath of God, but is actually the lack, the

Nothingness of necessity, the gaping hole of possibility, infinite possibility, the negativity

of finitude which motivates all voluntary action as a refusal to consent to the involuntary.

This is what is meant by the genesis of desire, as well as the discovery of the infinite. In

fact, “The false infinite needs to be placed in brackets to bring to light the authentic

infinite of freedom, the infinite of which Descartes says that it makes us like God. . . The

possibility of consent cannot be understood unless we abstract that deification of willing

which is in fact its demonization.”26

This “Evil Infinite” and the “paradoxical coexistence of freedom and the fault”27

will be seen in Symbolism of Evil under the theme of the superimposition of the

fundamental nature of freedom (innocence) and its bondage (fault). In a footnote here,

Ricoeur states that the reminiscence of innocence and the hope of freedom are so



27 Ibid, pp. 26-7.

intertwined, he says, “Thus the Poetics and the Empirics of the Will constantly interact.

Finally, the fault itself, in penetrating the region of the holy, already participates in the

Poetics: the sinner is closer to the saint than is the just man.”28 As absurd as this sounds,

it must be accepted that the sacred and the profane necessitate each other, and operate on

the same essential structures. Even so, no description of innocence is possible, only of

broken innocence.

We cannot dissociate the fault and Transcendence. The concrete experience of

Transcendence is what saves and liberates freedom from the fault (“Captivity and

deliverance of freedom are one and the same drama”).29 The vision of innocence and the

affirmation of Transcendence are linked by a subterranean affinity: “There is a Genesis

only in the light of an Apocalypse.”30 But Transcendence, innocence, is not accessible to

any description, not contained in the method of pure description, of descriptive

phenomenology, but in the later hermeneutic phenomenology beyond the eidetics where

the fault and transcendence are accessible by the removal of the eidetic brackets. In the

transition from descriptive to hermeneutic phenomenology we transit from description of

the pure to decryption of the obscure. The indetermination of the whole in which I am

involved and within which I was born and will die is the cipher of Transcendence:

Hence the idea of the whole itself disappears as the sum obtained by addition of

parts. I cannot give an accounting of being in which I am included. The world is

where I entered in being born. It is not an enumeration of objects—about which, in

28 Freedom and Nature, pp. 26, n.13.


30 Ibid.

addition, I do not know whether it is finite or infinite—but the indeterminate

encompassing my subjectivity. I do not know the whole, I am in the whole…. And

yet the Whole has a different meaning which is the hidden meaning of Stoic

philosophy and the reason for the detour of consent. The beginning of philosophy

is a Copernican revolution which centers the world of objects on the Cogito: the

object is for the subject, the involuntary is for the voluntary, motives are for choice,

capacities for effort, necessity for consent. The whole is the horizon of my

subjectivity in the sense of this first Copernican revolution. This entire work is

carried out under the sign of that first Copernican revolution…. But the deepening

of subjectivity calls for a second Copernican revolution which displaces the center

of reference from subjectivity to Transcendence.31

Ricoeur develops hermeneutic phenomenology in the light of the cipher of

Transcendence, as a worship, on could say, of Lux-cipher. Indeed, the second Copernican

revolution, the second coming of philosophy, marks a transition from center to cipher.

This indicates a tendency to the deification of a will to die and become, a Genesis that is

anthropogenesis upon demythization of the accusatory agency, such as the Evil Infinite.32

But this anthropogenesis may be re-inserted into a post-critical re-writing of the myth by

a decision of man that is a deicision of God. This is the post-critical myth which will be

written at the end of this essay. The origin of the post-critical myth, if forced, would no

longer be the murder of the mother chaos, the Sumerian Tiamat, nor the more elaborate

31 Freedom and Nature, pp. 471-473.

32 Cf. “The Demythization of Accusation” in Conflict of Interpretations, pp. 335: “The result of this renunciation is the gaining of a thought and a will which are no longer alienated. The positive side of this destruction is the manifestation of man as maker of his own human existence. It is an anthropogenesis.”

and anthropotropic Orphic titanomachy in whose ashes philosophy itself first arose like a

Copernical newt of the first degree. Instead we could suggest a second degree newt, a

new iconoclasm33 in the wake of the onto-theological God of classical philosophy,34 the

hermeneut baptized in the fire of Lux-cipher, in the hermeneutic alchemical

transformation of critical reflection. From the rich soil of classical philosophy, in the

desert of formal, univocal, technical languages and symbolic logic, to transit beyond the

age of information, a new species of thought, a new genre, or to spite the critical incense

which suspends poetic license, a new Genesis. It will suggest the way of a living

eschatology. But perhaps the cipher of Transcendence is only a cipher to thought itself,

whose dialectical vacillations we shall find in their purest form in the drama of creation.

To feeling, Transcendence is only a new direction. This axiological undertow, recurrent

and building in Ricoeur’s thought, is found in the ‘surplus of meaning’ or ‘supra-

signification of the verb,’35 as well as his later admission that the conjugal symbol would

be at the heart of the Poetics of the Will.36

The end of Volume One is again darkly Orphic, hoping for a revaluation of consent

in a reconciled ontology and restoration of freedom, having found that human freedom is

essentially an incarnate freedom, a willing born of refusal to consent to the involuntary,

33 “An idol must die so that a symbol of being may begin to speak.” Conflict of Interpretations, pp. 467, and “…every myth is iconoclastic toward others, in the same way that every symbol left to itself tends to thicken, to solidify into an idolatry. It is necessary, therefore, to share in this battle, in this dynamics, by which symbolism is subject to being itself surpassed.” Ibid, pp. 293. Following this selection, of course, we must acknowledge that such a Genesis would in fact be diabolic.

34 “Which god is dead? We can now reply: the god of metaphysics and also the god of theology, insofar as theology rests on the metaphysics of the first cause, necessary being, and the prime mover, conceived as the source of values and as the absolute good. Let us say that it is the god of onto-theology, to use the expression that was coined by Heidegger, following Kant.” Conflict of Interpretations, pp. 445.

35 Fallible Man, pp. 36.


and not a creative freedom—both its limitation and its grandeur.

Volume II: Fallible Man and Symbolism of Evil

The second volume, published in 1960, begins with Fallible Man, which does away

with the brackets of the first volume and focuses on the involuntary aspect of the will, on

finitude, the inherent limitation of man’s being, and specifically upon the notion of

fallibility, and from there develops the beginning of a philosophical anthropology. As he

says in the preface to Fallible Man, “the theory of fallibility represents a broadening of

the perspective of the first work, which was more closely centered on the structures of the

will.”37 Fallible Man and Symbolism of Evil were published jointly, and minus a third

book on psychopathology, criminology, and political and legal philosophy 38, constituted

volume two. Fallible Man continued a descriptive phenomenology, whereas Symbolism

of Evil introduced a decryptive phenomenology. From the possible creative

interpretations of the Poetics taken from the indications in this volume, mine comes from

viewing the structure of Fallible Man as the development of a philosophical anthropology

of human consciousness as distended between on the one hand the infinitesimal basis of

the negative power of the finite, whose significance is also infinitesimal and limited only

by the imagination, and on the other hand the indefinite syntheses within that

transcendental vision of empirical objectivity which itself is seen (known in imago) only

in the light of the mysterious “objectivity of the object”,39 the “objectival synthesis”40.

37 pp. xli.

38 Cf. Van Leeuwen, The Surplus of Meaning: Ontology and Eschatology in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, pp. 33, n. 6.

39 Fallible Man, pp. 38 - 41.

40 Ibid, pp. 39 – 40, 45, 82.

This is the characterization of man as mélange, as a mixing, as disproportionate, in a

Kantian manner, which guides the analysis of the intelligibility of the possibility of evil in

man in Fallible Man.

In The Surplus of Meaning: Ontology and Eschatology in the Philosophy of Paul

Ricoeur, Theodoor Marius Van Leeuwen performs an extensive analysis of the

Philosophy of the Will. Although it is clear that Symbolism of Evil contains much in the

way of a springboard to the mysterious waters of the unwritten Poetics, Van Leeuwen

says, “Fallible Man can be read as a prelude to both the study of the empirics of evil and

to the work that is projected as the concluding part of Philosophy of the Will, the

Poetics.”41 We shall certainly heed this and see what structure in it indicates the way to

our chosen interpretation of the Poetics. There are many interpretations of what the

Poetics was intended to be, and what it may be like, and not necessarily as Ricoeur

intended. There is a conflict of interpretations which necessitates a choice among the

various possible orderings of relevant elements to achieve different ends. Since the

Poetics was left wide open to interpretations, we shall here skip the sort of chronological

treatment of such clues that we had committed with regard to Freedom and Nature,

leaving a systematic analysis of Fallible Man to another time, and go straight to a specific

structure which will inform a new ‘post-critical’ myth,

These categories peculiar to human limitation must be disengaged directly from the

disproportionate relation of finitude to infinitude. It is this relation that constitutes

the ontological ‘locus’ which is ‘between’ being and nothingness, or, in other

41 Ibid, pp. 36.

words, man’s ‘degree of being,’ his ‘quantity of being.’ It is this relation that makes

human limitation synonymous with fallibility…. Let us try to disengage those

specific categories of human limitation by initiating a kind of ‘transcendental

deduction,’ that is, a justification of concepts through their power of making a

certain domain of objectivity possible. If we could show that these categories are

the condition of possibility of a certain discourse on man, these categories would

receive all the legitimation that one could require.42

This transcendental deduction is the human conclusion derived from the premises

of ‘originating affirmation’ and ‘existential negation,’ respectively, love and difference.

Difference here means both perspective as the origin of the finite, and the being that “I

am,” constituted by the action of existing. Love means the ‘objectival synthesis,’ the

objectivity of the object, which calls to the inimitable singularity of difference by its own

supra-signification, by the super-jection implied by the point of subjectivity. As Ricoeur

writes, “The first truth—I think, I am—remains as abstract and empty as it is

unassailable,”43 and “It is an undeniable certitude, but a certitude without any truth

value.”44 This much is given, and may be taken as a premise. Whereas, “We are always

already in the dimension of truth,”45 we do not find certainty there; on the contrary, “The

equivalence of certainty and truth is what we pursue through consciousness.”46 The

meaning of consciousness is the mediacy of mediation. Thus, consciousness is false

42 Ibid, pp. 134.


44 Ibid.

45 Fallible Man, pp. 29.

46 Ibid, pp. 30.

consciousness, naive consciousness. The transcendental deduction can only be premature

as a logical conclusion, and the true infinite escapes any certainty despite its ultimate

truth. We learn, therefore, that

The truth which Fichte called ‘thetic judgment’ is situated in the emptiness of an

absence from myself. This is why reflection is a task—an Aufgabe—the task of

equating my concrete experience with the affirmation: I am…. The emphasis

placed on the ethical side of reflection is not a limitation if we understand the

notion of ethics in its broad sense, much in the manner of Spinoza, who referred to

‘ethics’ as the total project of philosophy.47

Ethics, therefore, is much more than morality. If we take the surplus of meaning as basic

to our semantics as Ricoeur does,48 and acknowledge that “…the semantic level must not

be separated from the mythological level of symbols…”49, we might be ready to read

Ricoeur’s ethics into a creative inversion of the Adamic myth. Ricoeur seeks to preserve

the Platonic eros, the ‘desire to be,’ as the source of knowledge and unify it with the

Spinozistic conatus, the ‘effort to exist:’ “This effort is a desire because it is never

satisfied; but conversely, this desire is an effort because it is the affirmation of a unique

being. Effort and desire are the two aspects of this positing of the self in the first truth: I

am.”50


48 “…originating affirmation becomes progressively richer and more inward: at first it is only the vehemence of the Yes, which has the correlate of the “is” that is signified—or, to be more precise, supra-signified—by the Verb. This is the “transcendental” moment of affirmation. This moment is necessary but not sufficient; it is necessary to make the power of existing pass from the register of “living” to that of “thinking”; it is insufficient to assure us that we are that thinking.” Fallible Man, pp. 136.


50 Ibid, pp. 329.

Fundamental or originary ethics... is the hinge between these two movements of our

thought: the movement of mythical destruction and the movement of symbolic

instruction…. Ethics is the appropriation of our endeavor to exist, in its total

process from slavery to beatitude…. It is this positive aspect of existence which is

at the basis of the most primordial or originary affirmation of which we are

disposed in multiple ways....The affirmation of being in the lack of being: in its

most primordial structure, this is what effort is.51

This is Ricoeur’s ‘fundamental or originary ethics.’ Soon we will describe

Ricoeur’s reading of the Adamic myth and how to re-interpret it in a backwards way to

convert it from a myth of a Fall to a philosophical myth of Transcendence. The effort to

exist will be a necessity for existence itself to come to be in the first place, the negativity

or death of God’s ‘being,’ where ‘God’ is the beyond of being as the surplus of meaning,

as primary affirmation and the objectival synthesis: all premature graspings are ultimate

in truth value and yet premature for certainty, and hence articulated only at the level of

mythical organization of the symbols of the sacred. The desire to be is a premature

designation, not an empirical reality. It is the basis of the passions, a nothingness in

relation to being, but the very basis of meaning, significance, and value: the ultimate of

value. The symbol of God is this beyond from which all beings arrive.

The sympathetic re-enactment of the Symbolism of Evil in the imagination begins in

the phenomenological account of the confessions of the religious imagination of man

found in the (Western) traditional myths that tell of the origins of evil in man, by their

51 Ibid, pp. 340 - 341.

“spontaneous hermeneutics,” that is, as symbols of the second degree. As such, they have

primitive analogical meanings that are “spontaneously formed and immediately

significant.” He continues, “In this sense, symbols are more radical than myths. I shall

regard myths as a species of symbols, as symbols developed in the form of narrations.”52

With these considerations, Ricoeur proceeds to read the Sumero-Babylonian theogonic

myth of chaos (the theogony which precedes anthropogony), the Hellenic and Orphic

titanomachy and tragic myth, and finally the Adamic myth, whose pre-eminence is

projected to be observed in the Poetics of the Will by means of the crede ut intelligas,53

the hermeneutic circle in the dialectical form of believing and understanding:

Thus it is in hermeneutics that the symbol’s gift of meaning and the endeavor to

understand by deciphering are knotted together.... How does hermeneutics meet the

problem?... What we have just called a knot-- the knot where the symbol gives and

criticism interprets-- appears in hermeneutics as a circle. The circle can be stated

bluntly: ‘We must understand in order to believe, but we must believe in order to

understand.’ The circle is not a vicious circle, still less a mortal one; it is a living

and stimulating circle. We must believe in order to understand: never, in fact, does

the interpreter get near to what his text says unless he lives in the aura of the

meaning he is inquiring after.... It is not a kinship of one life with another that

hermeneutics requires, but a kinship of thought with what the life aims at-- in short,

of thought with the thing which is in question. It is in this sense that we must

believe in order to understand. And yet, it is only by understanding that we can

52 Symbolism of Evil, pp. 18.

53 Ibid, pp. 308, cf. “Conclusion: The Symbol Gives Rise to Thought”, pp. 347 - 357.

believe.54

Thus the hermeneutic circle is a knot which ties together the strands of

understanding and belief. What it unites is the matrice poetique.55 Untying the knot, the

circle which is an arc or a bow, gives birth, out of the matrix, out of the uterus, ‘out of the

box,’ so to speak, of the myth, to the semantic innovation, the novel meaning of being.

Our task is to get beyond the circle, to untie the knot, by transforming it into a wager:56

“...the task of the philosopher guided by symbols would be to break out of the enchanted

enclosure of consciousness of oneself, to end the prerogative of self-reflection.... The

task, then, is, starting from the symbols, to elaborate existential concepts-- that is to say,

not only structures of reflection but structures of existence, insofar as existence is the

being of man.”57

At the end of Freedom and Nature, in the course of the description of the “Black

existentialism” which is called “black” in awareness of the darkness of the anxiety and

despair of death and freedom’s consequent looking toward suicide as its ultimate

expression, the “No” of the Biblical Interdict-- which is also the “No” of condition and

the “No” of refusal, Ricoeur says,

Suicide presents itself to it as one of the highest possibilities: it is in effect the only

total action of which we are capable with respect to our own life.... Suicide can

appear the highest consecration of that act of rupture introduced by consciousness....

54 Ibid, pp. 351 - 352.

55 Surplus of Meaning, pp. 39.

56 Symbolism of Evil, pp. 355 - 357.

57 Ibid, pp. 357.

Thus the no would no longer be a word but an act. But suicide is not the only

expression of refusal. There might be a courage to exist in the absurd and to face up

to it, in comparison with which suicide itself would be only an evasion like those of

myths and hopes. This courage of disillusion refuses suicide in the sole intent of

affirming-- and preserving in the act of affirming-- the no of freedom in face of the

nonbeing of necessity.58

This courage to exist is Ricoeur’s answer to the profound freedom of Man’s suicide, but

it may be conflated with the deity’s suicide, with deicide, where, in a myth, God is

beyond being, and as such needing to withdraw from ‘itself’ for existence to arrive in a

mythical ‘first place.’ This a deicisive conversion of the diabolic myth of the Fall.

In the beginning, God created the universe, the garden, Adam, and all was good. To

account for evil, the serpent in the garden asks the woman (an externalization of Man)

“Has God truly said...?”59 which opened Man’s mind to a vascillatory doubt, to thought,

and with it to consciousness of good and evil. Man became liable to Fall through doubt.

This radical doubt is analogous to the radical doubt of Descartes. What was once a

creative limit, an innocent freedom, became the Interdict, God’s “No:” “The soul of the

serpent’s question is the ‘evil infinite.’”60 The meaning of finiteness or being created

being became obscured, and whereas the limit had been Man’s “Orient,” it became Man’s

“Other.” The inversion of this myth is obvious. God, as the ‘surplus of meaning,’ as the

‘objectival synthesis,’ as ‘primary or originary affirmation,’ must radically end, “value”


59 Symbolism of Evil, pp. 253.

60 Ibid.

gives way to form, beginning with the infinitesimal point origin, of the “I am.” God, in

the only act permitted to such a symbolic ground, an act of love, gives its own existence

for there to be existence. This is a myth of the origin of finitude.

Bibliography

Carlson, Thomas A. “Indiscretion: Finitude and the Naming of God.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Print.

Marcel, Gabriel. “Metaphysical Journal.” Washington D.C.: Henry Regnery Company, 1952. Print.

Ricoeur, Paul. “Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics.” Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969. Print

---. “Fallible Man.” 1960.---. “Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary.” 1950.---. “Freud and Phillosophy. Yale University Press, September 1977. Translated: Denis

Savage---. “Symbolism of Evil. 1960.Van Leeuwen, Theodoor Marius. “The Surplus of Meaning: Ontology and Eschatology

in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur.” Amsterdam: Rodopi, B.V., 1981. Print.

draft: on paul ricoeur's poetics of the will

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