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Faith, violence, and phronesis: narrative identity, rhetorical symbolism, and ritual embodiment in religious communities

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Abstract

This contribution explores the question to what extent religious narratives can move the adherents of religious communities to violence or teach wisdom and compassion, drawing on Ricoeur’s work on narrative, ethics, and biblical interpretation. It lays out Ricoeur’s account of narrative identity, urging him to connect his account of phronesis more fully with his analysis of threefold mimesis in his earlier work. It considers his biblical hermeneutics in light of this work on identity and moral action and suggests that bringing these various dimensions of his work together more fully than he himself does would provide a more substantive account of how identity is shaped in religious contexts. It might on the one hand help us to understand more fully a turn to fundamentalism or religious violence and on the other hand draw more clearly on the phronetic resources within religious traditions, especially as they are expressed in ritual behavior, to combat violence and teach wisdom and compassion.

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Notes

  1. On occasion, such a simplistic account of religion’s involvement with politics is challenged, as in William Cavanaugh’s argument (2009) that a very recent, Western, post-Enlightenment definition of religion as purely personal and private has led to regarding all “religious” violence as irrational, crazy, incoherent, and abhorrent, while “political” violence perpetrated by the nation state is regarded a priori as rational, coherent, and as undertaken only for justified and peaceful ends. He leaves open the question whether the violence exercised in the name of faith is caused by something within the religious adhesion itself or whether it is motivated by other forces and simply conveniently “cloaked” in religious rhetoric.

  2. Ricoeur (1984–1988), Ricoeur (1992, pp. 20–33).

  3. Ricoeur in Wood (1992).

  4. Many of these are included in the collection Figuring the Sacred (Ricoeur 1995).

  5. See the articles in the special volume dedicated to “Phenomenology and the Post-Secular Turn” (Staudigl 2016).

  6. Changeux and Ricoeur (2000, p. 298). Here and in a couple of other places he presumes a rather simplistic account of religion and violence of the sort often peddled by the news and many academics today.

  7. Ricoeur (2010, pp. 27–40).

  8. “It is indeed to a specific incapacity that the religious offers an answer, a word: the incapacity to do the good oneself. That which is called bad will, captive free will, servant-will is about an easily identifiable experience: it is felt as an intimate binding of oneself by oneself.” (ibid., p. 28). Second, “the religious has as its function the deliverance of the core of goodness from the bonds that hold it captive” (ibid., p. 30).

  9. Ibid., p. 34.

  10. “Meaning, invigorating each time for each religious community—the source of life is undoubtedly that. But jealous capture of the source remains the historically attested, disturbing phenomenon. The war of religions and the wars of religion have their origin there…. The religious never exists but in religions. And the religions, under the influence of the radical evil of which no one knows the origin, are connected, one to the other, in a relationship of mimetic rivalry, having as object the source of life undivided in its outflow, divided in its receptacles.” (ibid., p. 35).

  11. “Coming to a still higher level—and it is here that I can hope to overcome violence—at this more advanced stage, I say this: ‘At the very depth of my own conviction, of my own confession, I recognize that there is a ground which I do not control. I discern in the ground of my adherence a source of inspiration which, by its demand for thought, its strength of practical mobilization, its emotional generosity, exceeds my capacity for reception and comprehension.’ But then the tolerance that arrives at this peak risks falling down the slope on the other side, that of skepticism: aren’t all beliefs worthless? That is to say, do the differences not become indifferent? The difficulty then is to hold myself on the crest where my conviction is at the same time anchored in its soil, like its mother tongue, and open laterally to other beliefs, other convictions, as in the case of foreign languages. It is not easy to hold oneself at this crest…” (ibid., p. 39). The goal in all this always seems to be tolerance of other beliefs. I wonder, however, whether the crucial goal should not be a different one: not a move from thinking I’m right to tolerating other opinions, but rather a move from a focus on thinking/belief to a focus on practice.

  12. Ricoeur (1995, p. 235).

  13. Students have repeatedly commented that they assumed the article would continue on the next page and express disappointment that Ricoeur did not say more.

  14. See the essays “Love and Justice” (1995, pp. 315–329) and “The Logic of Jesus, the Logic of God” (ibid., pp. 279–283).

  15. Ricoeur cites the former example but not the latter. Aside from the fact that the logic of abundance or excess is not always benign, I would also challenge Ricour’s claim that ritual or the sacred always subscribe to a logic of equivalence. This is not true, for example, for much of Christian liturgy, both patristic and contemporary.

  16. The phrase “adhesion to the essential,” which is also prominent in his posthumously published work Living Up to Death, is his most common reference to religious faith, including his own (cf. the extended interview in Critique and Conviction).

  17. See especially his essay “Manifestation and Proclamation” (1995, pp. 48–67), in which he ventures the closest to a phenomenological analysis and yet clearly prefers the “hermeneutics of proclamation” over the “phenomenology of manifestation.” He consistently expresses reluctance in regard to a project of a “phenomenology of religious experience,” which he associates with Mircea Eliade. It is also telling that he identifies—quite falsely in my view—ritual or manifestation of the sacred with a logic of equivalence or correspondence, while he interprets the hermeneutics of prophecy as a logic of abundance and limit-expression. It is clear that he far prefers the latter to the former.

  18. See the essay “The Summoned Subject in the School of the Narratives of the Prophetic Vocation” (1995, pp. 262–275).

  19. See especially his late collaboration with the biblical scholar André LaCoque (LaCocque and Ricoeur 1998).

  20. See especially chapter 3 in volume 1 (1984, pp. 52–87) and chapter 7 in volume 3 (1988, pp. 157–179). See also the first four essays (comprising Part I) of Ricoeur (2007).

  21. Ricoeur (1984–1988, vol. I, p. 71).

  22. Ibid., p. 75. This is obviously worked out much more fully in his magisterial text Memory, History, Forgetting (2004). Ricoeur is quite clear that “language does not constitute a world for itself. It is not even a world. Because we are in the world and are affected by situations, we try to orient ourselves in them by means of understanding” (1984–1988, vol. I, p. 78).

  23. Ibid., p. 80.

  24. Ibid., p. 81.

  25. See especially Part II of Ricoeur (2007).

  26. Ricoeur (2007, p. 138).

  27. Ibid, p. 175.

  28. “This crisscrossing of utopia and ideology is the result of two fundamental directions of the social imaginary. The first moves toward integration, repetition, reflection. The second, because it is excentric, tends toward wandering.” (ibid., p. 186.) “It appeared to us then that ideologies—as second-order systems of representation referring to these mediations immanent to action—had the positive function of integration in relation to the social bond” (ibid., p. 206).

  29. Going back as far as his early examination of symbolism and myth in Ricoeur (1967), where it is sympathetic imagination that allows the move to a second naïveté.

  30. He alludes to it in chapter 2 of Ricoeur (1984–1988, vol. I, pp. 46–47).

  31. Ricoeur (1992, p. 138).

  32. Ibid., p. 162. See also “Life in Quest of Narrative” (Wood 1992), which develops this more fully.

  33. Ricoeur (1992, p. 175). It is still about identity: “The idea of the narrative unity of a life therefore serves to assure us that the subject of ethics is none other than the one to whom the narrative assigns a narrative identity.” (ibid., p. 178).

  34. Ibid., p. 202.

  35. Ibid, pp. 243, 246, 249.

  36. Ibid., p. 289.

  37. Ibid., p. 291–296.

  38. Aristotle, Poetics, 1448b, 1453a–b, 1461a. See also Kearney (2002, pp. 125–56).

  39. Ricoeur (1992, p. 164). Later he says “Telling a story… is deploying an imaginary space for thought experiments in which moral judgment operates in a hypothetical mode” (ibid., p. 170).

  40. Although the practices might be far more important than often recognized, they are informed by narratives and already have a narratival character (in the sense of mimesis1).

  41. Richard Kearney’s work is one important attempt to retrieve these elements for a contemporary audience. See, among other texts, Kearney (2010).

  42. See also Ricoeur’s essay “Philosophy and Religious Language,” in which he analyzes the ways in which religion conveys truth (1995, pp. 35–47).

  43. It is not coincidental that it is often religious festivals or special occasions that result in violence. Emotions are already at a pitch and thus it takes much less to make them boil over—or even to have them turn into their opposite (the joy of celebration into hostility against the “other” who does not celebrate with “us”).

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Gschwandtner, C.M. Faith, violence, and phronesis: narrative identity, rhetorical symbolism, and ritual embodiment in religious communities. Cont Philos Rev 53, 371–384 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-020-09489-7

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