Abstract
This essay examines what the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur can contribute to current debates on the role of spiritual exercise, or askēsis, in philosophical life. The influential work of Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault has sparked a widespread interest in the ancient model of philosophy, variously described as a way of life, art of living, or care of the self. Ricoeur’s potential contribution to this conversation has been overlooked, largely because he does not discuss these themes explicitly or often. However, Ricoeur’s early phenomenology of embodiment in The Voluntary and the Involuntary offers valuable insights regarding the exercises of self-transformation. After a brief survey of Ricoeur’s concept of askēsis, this essay draws on Ricoeur to demonstrate the merits of physical exercise, or gymnastic, in ethical and spiritual formation. Gymnastic, Ricoeur shows, can be a form of spiritual exercise. The final section of the paper then makes a similarly counterintuitive claim: namely, that reading is an embodied practice that can facilitate the ethical formation of the lived body.
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Notes
Nussbaum (1994).
Nehamas (1998).
Cooper (2012).
Sloterdijk (2013).
Ricoeur (1992, p. 2).
Michel (2015, p. 76).
Ibid., p. 103.
Barthélémy (2010) and Castonguay (2010). Foucault’s later work on the disciplines of subjectivity arose from his growing recognition that ethics and politics requires a more robust model of the subject than his earlier genealogical work could provide. In this regard Foucault comes closer to Ricoeur, who insists on the importance of the subject throughout his work. Like Foucault, Ricoeur’s work branches out expansively into the human and social sciences; unlike Foucault, however, Ricoeur’s continually roots his inquiry in philosophical anthropology. Thus in his Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, Ricoeur cites Foucault alongside Althusser and French structuralism as united by the conviction that “the ‘philosophical…myth of man’ must be reduced to ashes.” Ricoeur’s objection is that this anti-humanism does not provide a sufficient basis for defending human rights. See Ricoeur (1986b, p. 131).
Michel (2015, p. 105).
Ricoeur argues that the cogito cannot be known directly through psychological evidence, intellectual intuition, or “mystical vision.” Instead, reflection must strive to recapture “the ego cogito in the mirror of its objects, its works, its acts,” since these objectify the ego. Thus a “reflective philosophy is the contrary of the immediate. The first truth—I am, I think—remains as abstract and empty as it is invincible; it has to be ‘mediated’ by the ideas, actions, works, institutions, and monuments that objectify it. It is in these objects, in the widest sense of the word, that the Ego must lose and find itself.” There is therefore no immediate self-consciousness. “Consciousness … is a task because it is not given.” Ricoeur (1970, pp. 43–44). Cf. Michel (2015, p. 105).
Ricoeur (1967a, p. 16).
For more detailed discussion of this point, see Jacobs (2013). Also note Michel’s point that Ricoeur “feels closest” to Husserl’s later phenomenological project in the Krisis, which “seeks to establish new pathways between knowledge of oneself and the transformation of the self, and in that respect, there is still a form of spirituality provided by the father of phenomenology.” Michel (2015, pp. 106–07).
Ricoeur (1970, pp. 422, 494).
Ibid.
“Existence and Hermeneutics,” p. 20.
“A Philosophical Interpretation of Freud,” in Ricoeur (1974, p. 172). This theme of ascetic renunciation recurs throughout Ricoeur’s engagement with psychoanalysis. Ricoeur refers to an “ascesis of reflection,” and a “discipline of reflection,” since “it brings about that dispossession of consciousness and governs the ascesis of that narcissism that wishes to be taken for the true Cogito.” Ricoeur (1970, pp. 27, 54, 60, 422, 494). To be dispossessed of the origin of meaning in this way is a difficult process, just as it is painful to embrace the principle of Ananke, or Necessity, and also to renounce the nostalgia for a primordial father, who provides consolation and comfort amidst our fears and an object for our desires. See “Religion, Atheism, and Faith,” in Ricoeur (1974, pp. 458–59).
Ricoeur (1974, p. 172).
Ricoeur (1970, p. 36).
“The Critique of Religion,” in Ricoeur (1978, p. 219).
Ibid., p. 222.
Ricoeur (1991, p. 37).
Foucault (2005, p. 522).
For Ricoeur’s discussion of the exalted, humiliated, and wounded cogito, see his introduction to Ricoeur (1992).
Ricoeur also presents Kant’s critical philosophy as having this sort of purifying intent. “The paralogisms and antinomies thus become for critical reason the ascetic instruments by which it is led back to itself within those boundaries where its knowledge is valid.” Ricoeur (1995, p. 223).
In Oneself as Another, Ricoeur shows how reading literary narratives can transform our being-toward-death by providing a sort of consolation “in the face of the unknown, or nothingness” by giving the imagination particular examples to anticipate what dying might be like. Fiction can thereby guide us “in the apprenticeship of dying,” facilitating a certain “mourning for oneself.” Ricoeur (1992, p. 162). Similarly, Ricoeur observes that “meditation on the Passion of Christ has accompanied … more than one believer to the last threshold” (ibid).
Like reading, writing can likewise aid in the work of mourning, as Ricoeur demonstrates in Living up to Death, a text that collects his own attempts at the work of mourning in writing. Ricoeur quotes Claude-Edmonde Magny to this effect: “‘No one can write unless his heart is pure, unless he has sufficiently cast off his own personality’ … ‘Writing, if it claims to be more than a game, or a gamble, is but a long, endless labor of ascesis, a way of casting off by keeping a firm hold on oneself through recognizing and bringing into the world the other one always is.’” Quoted in Ricoeur (2009, p. 39).
Ricoeur (1966, p. 20).
Descartes (1985, p. 403).
Ricoeur (1966, p. 21).
Ibid., pp. 276–77.
Ibid., p. 279.
Ibid., p. 278.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 279.
Ibid., pp. 313–14.
Ibid., p. 314.
Ibid.
Ricoeur (1966, p. 288).
Ibid., p. 302.
Ricoeur (1986a, p. 57).
Ricoeur (1966, p. 315).
Ricoeur (1966, p. 314).
Ricoeur (1966, p. 314).
Diogenes Laertius (Book VI.70–72).
Ricoeur (1986a, p. 81).
Ibid., pp. 81–82, 126.
Ibid., p. 127.
Ibid., p. 129.
Ibid., p. 8.
Ricoeur (1966, p. 22).
Currently the best source for this aspect of Ricoeur’s thought are the essays collected in Ricoeur (1995). According to Ricoeur’s most mature work on the topic, the goal of religion is the liberation of human capability—the capable human being (l’homme capable).
Ricoeur (1986a, p. 66).
Ricoeur (1967b). Lamenting this shift in Ricoeur’s thought, Richard Kearney has recently noted how Oneself as Another helps to reconnect Ricoeur’s early phenomenology of the body with his subsequent hermeneutical turn. In discussing Husserl’s account of intersubjectivity, which is founded on appresentation, analogical apprehension, and pairing, Ricoeur notes that for Husserl I understand the other not on the basis of reasoning to a conclusion, nor in a primordial intuition, but in an immediate interpretation of indications, “much as the reading of symptoms.” Ricoeur (1992, p. 334, n.39). I can never achieve a perfect union with the other, experiencing her there as my here. Instead, Kearney writes, “I can only respond by ‘reading’ their transcendence in immanence, across distance and difference.” Kearney, (2015, p. 54). As Kearney shows, touch—along with each other mode of embodied affectivity—is an interpretive event. My encounter with the world, with its objects therein, and most significantly with other selves, is itself hermeneutical. Hermeneutics does not subsist on purely intellectual sense, because so much of the meaning we encounter and understand has a thoroughly fleshly nature. As such, the idealist tendencies of hermeneutics must give way to a thoroughly carnal hermeneutics.
The title of the subsection in Ch.10 of Ricoeur (1992, p. 319). He notes that actively touching something other than oneself establishes a certainty regarding my own existing, insofar as I extend effort to touch, as well as the existence of otherness, which offers resistance—i.e. solidity, texture—to my effort. In touching, “one’s own body is revealed to be the mediator between the intimacy of the self and the externality of the world.” Ricoeur (1992, p. 322).
Illich (1996, p. 57).
Ibid., p. 58.
Ibid., p. 60.
Ibid., pp. 60–61.
Leder (1990, p. 122).
Ricoeur (1966, p. 143).
Ibid., p. 85.
Ibid., p. 101.
Ibid., p. 107.
Ibid., pp. 103–04.
Ricoeur (1992, p. 115).
Ricoeur (1966, p. 203).
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 212.
Ibid., p. 237.
Ibid., p. 255.
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Gregor, B. Ricoeur’s askēsis: textual and gymnastic exercises for self-transformation. Cont Philos Rev 51, 421–438 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-017-9424-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-017-9424-6