Abstract
The main contribution of Ricœur’s work Oneself as Another to current debates on personal identity and the self is the elaboration of a new concept of selfhood that includes some features of Heidegger’s Selbstheit, but is utterly different from the classic starting point of egologies from Descartes onward, namely, the “I” or the “Self”. In the Heideggerian sense, selfhood is no longer a kind of entity, distinct from the human being or the embodied individual, or a name for the very continuity of consciousness, as it happens in Locke, but a mode of being (Weise zu sein) of Dasein. But in contrast with Heidegger, selfhood is also, according to Ricœur, a type of identity, since the whole conceptuality of Oneself as Another rests on a distinction between idem-identity and ipse-identity – only the latter being synonymous with selfhood. This article seeks to understand and to challenge the connection drawn by Ricœur between the problem of selfhood and the problem of identity to oneself, suggesting that the former notion cannot really be understood as a sort of identity.
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Notes
- 1.
“I would like to characterize the philosophical tradition from which I draw by three traits: it is in the line of a reflexive philosophy; it remains within the movement of Husserlian phenomenology; it seeks to be a hermeneutic variant of that phenomenology,” (translated from the original French) (Ricœur 1998: 29). Jean Grondin has shown quite aptly that in reality it will not do to understand the appearance itself of the concept of hermeneutics in Ricœur, in the second volume of Philosophy of the Will, as an act of allegiance to the Heideggerian hermeneutic or its Gadamerian continuations (Truth and Method was published the same year), but rather as a solution to an original problem: that of integrating into philosophical discourse a reflection on the Christian symbolism of evil and consequently the problem of “the rules of deciphering applied to a world of symbols,” (Ricœur, 1960: 12) (translated from the original French). See the conclusion of Le Volontaire et l’involontaire, « Le symbole donne à penser » and J. Grondin (2013), chapter 3.
- 2.
- 3.
This idea of second degree commitment is not literally Ricœurian, but it seems to me implicitly contained in a passage from the 1985 conference “Individual and Personal Identity” where Ricœur writes: “The obligation to keep one’s promise is, in a certain sense, the promise of promise,” (Ricœur 2013: 352, translated from the original French).
- 4.
See also Ricœur 1992: 3: “the dialectic of self and the other than self.”
- 5.
See Ricœur 1992: 123: “it is not certain that ‘anticipatory resoluteness’ in the face of death exhausts the sense of self-constancy [maintien de soi] […] Other attitudes […] reveal just as much about the fundamental conjunction between the problematic of permanence in time and that of the self, inasmuch as the self docs not coincide with the same”. Thus, to theorize self-constancy, it is not necessary to assign it to Heideggerian resoluteness. On the contrary, to conceive of such a constancy, insists Ricœur, “The properly ethical justification of the promise suffices of itself,” and is expressed in the phrase “I will hold firm”.
- 6.
Cf. Heidegger 1986: p. 188, 218, 320, 435. In these passages, the term Selbigkeit refers not to the mode of being of Selbstheit, but rather to the mode of permanence of a being Vorhanden. This point is well illustrated by the following passage on page 320: “Denn der ontologische Begriff des Subjekts charakterisiert nicht die Selbstheit des Ich qua Selbst, sondern die Selbigkeit und Beständigkeit eines immer schon Vorhandenen.” According to Stambaugh’s translation: “Nevertheless, he [Kant] conceives this I again as subject, thus in an ontologically inappropriate sense. For the ontological concept of the subject does not characterize the selfhood of the I qua self, but the sameness and constancy of something always already objectively present.” (Heidegger 1996: 295, my emphasis). In other texts, however, and especially in the Basic Problems of Phenomenology Heidegger does contrast two types of identity: “The Dasein is not only, like every being in general, identical with itself in a formal-ontological sense—everything is identical with itself—and it is also not merely, in distinction from a natural thing, conscious of this self-sameness. Instead, the Dasein has a peculiar selfsameness with itself in the sense of selfhood. It is in such a way that it is in a certain way its own, it has itself, and only on that account can it lose itself.” (Heidegger 1975: 242; Heidegger 1982: 170). It is as if Ricœur based his theory more on the 1927 lectures than on Being and Time.
- 7.
“I myself am not for the most part the who of Da-sein, but the they-self is. Authentic being-a-self shows itself to be an existentiell modification (Modifikation) of the they which is to be defined existentially.” (Heidegger 1996: 247, §54).
- 8.
“My working hypothesis [is] that the distinction between selfhood and sameness does not simply concern two constellations of meaning but involves two modes of being” (Ricœur 1992: 209).
- 9.
- 10.
See Ricœur 2013: 356. Let us note in passing that the first part of the definition is no less problematic than the second: “identical” cannot mean “extremely similar”, since the identity relation is symmetrical (if A = B and B = C then A = C), whereas the relation of similarity (even “extreme”) is not. At best, “identical” means absolutely similar, similar in all respects, and thus indiscernible.
- 11.
See Ricœur 1988: 246: “Unlike the abstract identity of the Same, narrative identity, constitutive of selfhood [ipséité], can include change, mutability […]” [I depart from Blarney and Pellauer who render “ipséité” by “self-constancy” in this passage – Translator].
- 12.
As Wittgenstein puts it: “to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing” (Wittgenstein 1922 proposition 5.5303). To say that a thing is identical to itself is to say that there are not to things, but a single one; and to say of one and the same thing that it is identical to itself is to say that a thing identical to itself is identical to itself, which is a pure tautology.
- 13.
On the Cartesian innovation, see V. Carraud 2010.
- 14.
Cf. Sixth Meditation: meum corpus, sive potius me totum: (Descartes 1983: 81).
- 15.
The French word “unité” signifies “unit” both in the sense of being single individual and something that possesses unity in itself (Translator’s note).
- 16.
This consequence stands out explicitly in the discussion of the problem of the Eucharist in this same letter to Mesland: “That is to say, when we call it the surface of the bread, we mean that although the air which surrounds the bread is changed, the surface remains always numerically the same [eadem numero], provided the bread does not change, but changes with it if it does,” (Descartes 1991: 242.)
- 17.
See D. Hume 1978: 14: “This relation [of identity] I here consider as apply’d in its strictest sense to constant and unchangeable objects.”
- 18.
Among the rare exceptions, we must count Marya Schechtman, whose The Constitution of Selves, (Schechtman 1982) distinguishes the re-identification question, which has served as the guiding theme for nearly all the authors who have reflected on personal identity, from the characterization question, which seems to her more apt to capture the aspects of identity which “really count” from a philosophical point of view.
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Romano, C. (2016). Identity and Selfhood: Paul Ricœur’s Contribution and Its Continuations. In: Davidson, S., Vallée, MA. (eds) Hermeneutics and Phenomenology in Paul Ricoeur. Contributions to Hermeneutics, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33426-4_4
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