The Sacred and the Profane

Contemporary Demands on Hermeneutics

Jeffrey F. Keuss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351882347
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Hermeneutics continues to be an area of interest to many, yet recent discussions in hermeneutic theory have turned toward fringe areas - whether found in realms of post-structuralism or radical orthodoxy - that have resulted in a 'forgetfulness' of one of hermeneutics' key thinkers, Immanuel Kant. This book seeks to reaffirm Kant's place as a central thinker for hermeneutics and to challenge and support prevailing criticisms. It has been argued that Kant merely offers a theory of the subjective universality of a rational aesthetic judgement where only reason connects us to the transcendent and sensation is only a subjective and confusing factor that distracts and distorts reason. This position is challenged as well as supported by the contributors to this book, scholars who bring key issues in hermeneutics to light from American, British, and continental perspectives, grounded in questions and concerns germane to today's culture. The discussion of hermeneutics is framed as being deliberately an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural affair. The Sacred and the Profane provides a welcome addition to contemporary discussions on hermeneutic theory through its assertion that there is still a need to support a critical approach to hermeneutics after Kant.

Chapter 1
Ethics within the Limits of Post-Ricœurian Kantian Hermeneutics: Autonomy and Vulnerability

Pamela Sue Anderson

Background: on Ricœur

In 1971, Paul Ricœur asserted that ‘all hermeneutics are Kantian’.¹ This remains true insofar as modern hermeneuticists accept that there are limits to human knowledge of self, freedom and reality. These limits render necessary the indirect strategy of interpretation of signs, or ‘traces’,² of our actions in and on the world. This chapter proposes to place ethics within the limits of a ‘post-Ricœurian Kantian’ hermeneutics. This is to appropriate, with my own distinctive twist, Ricœur’s self-description of post-Hegelian Kantian. I include under my title Ricœur’s ground-breaking work on hermeneutics of suspicion and of retrieval, but also his later work on ‘that little ethics’ (cette petite éthique³) in Oneself as Another and on the ‘capable human being’ (l’homme capable) in The Just.⁴

At the same time this chapter is intended to fill a void in current discussions of Ricœur which tend to trace his ethical reflections back to his earliest work on a philosophy of the will without considering the dual moments of his hermeneutics. For me, this leaves a gaping silence and reflects a lack of critical discussion of the hermeneutic principles which shape his current Kantian project.⁵ I would like to speak into this silence, in order to rethink how, after Kant, Ricœur demonstrates the crucial role of negative and positive hermeneutics.

For my central example, I will consider the relationship between vulnerability and autonomy at the heart of an ethics within the limits of hermeneutics. The principles of hermeneutics can reveal to us that we are vulnerable because of an inability to grasp directly the act of existing, ‘except in signs scattered in the world’.⁶ In other words, the indirect strategy of interpretation makes us vulnerable to uncertainty, to error, to the violence of misunderstanding or of deliberate distortion and corruption; at the same time Ricœur insists that interpretive reflections are always already ethical (where the possibility of their being unethical is implicit), even before they become critical. Allow me to set the scene for understanding this ethical-critical relation as, so to speak, the pulse of hermeneutics.

In my estimation it has been too easy for postmodern thinkers, as part of their celebration of ‘the death’ of Enlightenment projects, to reject the critical developments in modern hermeneutics. This rejection has been to their – and our – great loss. They have given up the interpretative tools necessary for understanding current thought and (ethical) action in relation to our ineradicable Enlightenment heritage. In response, I contend that Ricœur offers these tools. His description of hermeneutics in the 1960s still rings true: ‘Modern hermeneutics … remains in the line of critical thought… we are in every way children of criticism, and we seek to go beyond criticism by means of a criticism that is no longer reductive, but restorative’.⁷

To develop my case for a post-Ricœurian Kantian hermeneutics I focus upon a specific example from Kant’s ethics (in the next section). I propose that giving our attention to hermeneutics in a case study of a moral agent will force us to retrieve Kant’s concept of autonomy from analytic philosophy’s formalist readings which, arguably, grow out of a quite different interpretation of Kant. This retrieval will include not only autonomy, but its relation to vulnerability; and here vulnerability is associated with embodiment, or ‘an ethics of the body’, and not only with the abstract possibility of being wrong.⁸ It is assumed by certain critics that we should reject Kant’s ethics because concepts such as autonomy are abstract and opposed to the particularity of concrete life. Not only analytic moral philosophers, but postmodern theorists, simply assume that Kant gives privilege to autonomy as a sort of detached, callous independence. I propose that we look at a passage from Kant’s own text in order to challenge, decisively, this assumption. This also entails defending Ricœurian hermeneutics against those postmodern thinkers (including philosophers and theologians⁹) who reject the Enlightenment, especially Kant’s philosophy.

Hermeneutics enables our critical confrontation of overly formalist readings of Kantian autonomy. Ricœur in particular provides us with a good account of how to read autonomy according to a Kantian architectonic.¹⁰ This is despite his own acknowledged doubts about modern Kantian moral theory. Moreover, Ricœur’s hermeneutic reading of Kant offers tools to challenge the account of Kantian moral theory which is caricatured by feminist philosophers. Seyla Benhabib presents the caricature:

Kant’s error was to assume that I, as a pure rational agent reasoning for myself, could reach a conclusion that would be acceptable for all at all times and places. In Kantian moral theory, moral agents are like geometricians in different rooms who, reasoning alone for themselves, all arrive at the same solution to a problem.¹¹

But is this ‘Kant’s error’? Or is it the error of modern philosophical interpretations of Kant which have read his eighteenth-century examples of moral agents in terms of twentieth-century analytic philosophy? These are basic questions of hermeneutics.

How have Kant’s ethics been, and how should they be, interpreted? I wager that reading his ethics (reflexively) within the limits of a post-Ricœurian Kantian hermeneutics might equally reveal its compatibility with certain feminist sensibilities. For a recent example of feminist sensibilities concerning the relation between modern philosophy and the history of philosophy, consider this account of Michèle Le Doeuff’s collaborative readings as presented by Genevieve Lloyd:¹²

The activity of the history of philosophy, as it is presented by Le Doeuff’s later work, involves a collaborative positioning of the commentator in relation to the author. The kind of reading of texts envisaged here … opens philosophy out to concerns that cannot be circumscribed by what authors think they are about. But the text is now opened out not just to its own cultural context but to the independent concerns of the contemporary reader herself. … History of philosophy becomes a collaborative effort – re-thinking past philosophical thought in a new context.¹³

However, before I run ahead of my current argument and discuss how a collaborative reading would challenge other feminist criticisms of Kant, consider what new things Ricœur says for current debates. Ricœur is right: we are children of Kant’s own critical thought, but he is also readily aware of the critical distance between Kant and twenty-first-century thinking. We need the interpretive tools to read the past in terms of both criticism, or suspicion, and restoration, or retrieval. Otherwise, there is a reduction of our thinking to the present, with an inadequate understanding of our relationship to the past.

I have pointed out previously that Ricœur’s own account of the calculative test for the morality of an action might, in fact, agree with Benhabib’s caricature in the earlier quotation.¹⁴ Roughly, this calculative test for the morality of an action involves an appropriation of Kant’s first formulation of the categorical imperative as a test for the universalisability of the maxim (that is, subjective underlying principle) of an action. However, both Ricœur and Benhabib are influenced by another, continental strand of Kantian moral reasoning which we find in Jurgen Habermas. For Benhabib, this influence is evident in her proposal that ‘the generalized other’, who is privileged in current Kantian moral theory, needs to be reread in relation to ‘the concrete other’. For Ricœur, the autonomy of the moral subject must be reviewed in terms of the vulnerability of an agent who is also always a patient. As will be further discussed in the third and fourth sections, Ricœur paints a picture of autonomy as fragile, since it can be easily broken down by the violence to which every agent is vulnerable. For him, autonomy itself must be portrayed as reflexive, personally and socially embedded in lived experience. Ricœur’s reclamation of autonomy, within his larger argument concerning selfhood, exhibits a deeper debt to, and insight on, Kant than his explicit rejection of formalism would suggest.¹⁵

Far from leaving Kant behind in his hermeneutics of selfhood, Ricœur offers a highly significant rereading of Enlightenment philosophy for the twenty-first century. In Oneself as Another, but also in political lectures such as ‘Autonomie et vulnérabilité’, delivered during the 1990s, Ricœur has continued to raise timely questions about Kant’s ethics.¹⁶ In particular, he has come to focus upon the capable subject who can become autonomous; but this is a task involving struggle with various stages and forms of vulnerability. According to Ricœur’s reading of Kant’s What is Enlightenment?, the task of political subjects who are in a state of submission is to dare to think autonomously; and I would extend this task to vulnerable, often impoverished women. At the same time, this subject would not be vulnerable if he or she were not already called to become autonomous; that is, Ricœur sees autonomy as a fundamental condition of human beings, while vulnerability is always fashioned historically; and he notes the qualities of the modern (Enlightenment) condition, which have become contemporary in the sense of reflecting distinctive sorts of vulnerability today.

So Ricœur’s readings of Kant as both timeless and timely make Ricœur unlike the twentieth-century opponents of Kantian autonomy. Too often these opponents claim to be objecting to Enlightenment ancestry, but fail to show knowledge of either Kant’s own arguments or their relevance today. They argue against what they see as Kant’s abstract style of moral reasoning on the grounds of broadly empiricist accounts of the self, action and freedom. Some (feminist) ethicists have followed Carol Gilligan’s empirical studies of a different voice and her critique of autonomy, recognizing the missing dimensions of the concrete other in modern moral philosophy.¹⁷ However, I would caution against the all-too-easy assumption that an empiricist critique of gender difference provides adequate grounds for a feminist critique of moral reasoning by uncovering evidence of a woman’s way of thinking as different from a man’s. The empiricist critique is not enough to achieve change, since a reduction not only of women’s thinking to evidence is necessarily limited by the status quo, but of moral reasoning.

According to a post-Ricœurian Kantian hermeneutics, a restorative method, or retrieval, should accompany feminist suspicion of Kantian autonomy. The two hermeneutical moments of suspicion and retrieval will, I contend, enable a ‘critical restoration’ of the concept of autonomy from its distortions by both (feminist) empiricist and (masculinist) formalist readings of the self and its agency. A hermeneutic retrieval of Kant’s ethical reflection has implications for a much larger critique of our cultural thinking. This would be a critique of thinking that is plagued by oppositions, which are not the same as a proper use of distinctions, between the concrete and the abstract, Aristotle and Kant, women and men. Not only is treating these distinctions as stark oppositions inaccurate, but it can be harmful. Those who side with only the first term of the oppositions include the misguided detractors of Kantian autonomy to whom Ricœur’s petite éthique can speak. Ironically sometimes this means speaking to himself insofar as, I think, Ricœur must be careful. Who is he criticizing in his denigration of a particular figure of a formalist Kant? Perhaps this is not Kant himself, but the caricature mentioned earlier.

Ricœur’s studies do not avoid the larger systematic and ontological issues of selfhood and reason, informing an adequate account of moral action and autonomy. These ontological issues include Ricœur’s universal, evaluative conception of the subject’s identity as self-same (ipse) read in terms of selfhood. He defines ipse-identity in relation to sameness (idem), as well as otherness (alterity). The method of truth appropriate to his account of selfhood is a form of ‘belief in … ‘, or credence, which testifies to the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: the Sacred and the Profane in Hermeneutics after Kant
• 1 Ethics within the Limits of Post-Ricceurian Kantian Hermeneutics: Autonomy and Vulnerability
• 2 Kant and Radical Evil: eine Rettung des Teufels?
• 3 On the Relation of Kant’s Aesthetics to his Practical Work
• 4 The Hermeneutics of Hamann: ‘Condescensio’, and ‘Irony’
• 5 David Friedrich Strauss and Mythi in Das Leben Jesu
• 6 Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutic: the Sacred and the Profane
• 7 Depth Hermeneutic and the Literary Work of Art: Religious Tradition, Hermeneutic Theory and Nihilism
• 8 Myth and Kerygma: Northrop Frye‘s ‘Critique’ of Bultmann
• 9 Ricœur: Thinking Biblically or ‘Penser la Bible’?
• 10 Ethics, Hermeneutics and Politics: a Critical Standpoint on Memory
• Bibliography
• Index