Selfhood and Agency in Ricoeur and Aristotle

Abstract

ProQuest Information and Learning: Foreign text omitted The issue of personal identity has (at least since Locke) largely been preoccupied with the issue of whether, and in what sense, an individual person can be said to the from one moment of time to another. Various responses have been presented, rejected, and reformulated. Some of these responses have appealed to the metaphysics of a substantial soul, others have sought an answer in the body, and others still have found refuge in the concept of psychological continuity, to name the most prominent solutions. Each of these proposed solutions has in common the search for the self as something which remains the same through time. Recently, Paul Ricoeur has raised some doubts about this tradition, arguing that while the concept of sameness is certainly a crucial issue for personal identity, it is also true that this concept might narrowly restrict the reality of what it means to be a person. In other words, is it not possible that am is not restricted to what remains verifiably the same about me from one moment to the next? This question is raised by Ricoeur in his recent work Oneself as Another, where we are told that one of his primary objectives is to set forth a theory of personal identity that properly distinguishes between selfhood and sameness, between ipse-identity and idem-identity. Ricoeur claims that this can be accomplished in a hermeneutics of the self, a theory that recognizes that one's identity is always a product of interpretation and is, therefore, given mediately through one's words, one's actions, one's life-story, and one's relation to another, among other things. It is this project of constructing a hermeneutical model of the self in Oneself as Another that is the topic of this essay, in which will focus on the means by which he arrives at this new concept of selfhood. My discussion shall be confined, generally, to three related claims. First, want to show that despite the refreshing novelty of Ricoeur's hermeneutically reflective methodology and its resistance to the traditional attempt to reduce selfhood to sameness, his analysis of the self is nonetheless very old in another sense, viz., in advocating praxis in opposition to theoria. This traditional quality of Ricoeur's analysis reveals itself in many ways, most obviously in the role that action plays, as opposed to thought, as the locus for the self. In so far as Ricoeur understands the task of hermeneutical reflection on personal identity to be one of re-opening the question who? it becomes clear that the question gets its fullest sense for Ricoeur not in querying who thinks? but rather in who acts? This leads, then, to my second claim: the change of venue away from a knowing subject to an acting self carries with it a price. This price is apparent in Ricoeur's struggle in Oneself as Another (and more recently in The Just) with the connection between persons and their self-constituting activity-now no longer thinking, but acting. In brief, the unexpected problem faced by Ricoeur is that whereas my thinking is inseparable from me (to the degree that philosophers have long been susceptible to identifying the I with that very thinking), actions (as occurrences in the world) are not so clearly my own, but must be shown to be so. This problem, a problem of in the context of Oneself as Another, and of responsibility and imputation in the context of The Just, has always been a matter of some practical difficulty-especially in the context of the law. However, of late it has become a philosophical difficulty of acute proportions, and in the case of Ricoeur in particular, it threatens to undermine his model of personal identity. Finally, my third claim attempts to bring the first two together. In the last part of this essay, particularly in view of an oversight in Ricoeur's analysis of Aristotle, will suggest that the problem of ascription experienced by Ricoeur can never be fully answered so long as we remain exclusively in the realm of praxis, but can only be resolved by appeal to the tradition of theoria. …