"petites personnes", suspicion and distrust

The many readers of "Herzog" were not mere nobodies in the literary career of Saul Bellow.

Eliade, Ricoeur and Taylor. The latter, the Canadian philosopher, finds himself referenced in the Vienna lectures on recognition, but somehow a credit to Gabriel Marcel on the gift is missing.

Marcel converted, but I am not aware of a note by Ricoeur on his remaining a Protestant and his distance from the Catholic Church (so very different for the Anglicans or American Lutherans and Episcopalians.)

Les Fonds Ricoeur, in an official response to Robert Lévy, offer us des petites personnes and their preoccupations, I suppose.

In France, Ricoeur came to be recognized - the fulfillment of his career, his professional life. In America, he was at none other than U. Chicago.

I cannot help wondering if he may have seen the flawed Russian film, "The Return", prior to his lectures in Vienna on recognition.

Consider these nobodies. Some remain without any distinguishable religious beliefs but remain uncomfortable when it is announced that there will be a new assessment by eminent scientists of what behavior (not behaviour) distinguishes our own species from earlier primates and hominids.

Eliade was required reading in so many colleges, required by professors who were certain that there is always the need for faith.

Taylor is so crass as to toy with his readers: "Is that all there is?"

I wonder about capable scientists and judges whose careers meet with no acclaim: a few publications and few  judgments over-turned on appeal and those appeals upheld.

In one collection of Taylor's essays in technical philosophy, a "grey essay" appears: an unpublished "paper".  It is now common to create posthumous "Collected Works" in which each and every scrap finds its place in the master's legacy.  But the fate of the "grey papers" of Ricoeur?

Ricoeur's own turn of phrase in the English translation seems most apt for Taylor: "the rhapsody of ideas".  Eliade will eventually be placed with Arendt, a "writer" and not a "researcher" and a writer with an agenda.

Against the lot, I prefer Milosz responding, if you will, to Raja Rao, or Avishai Margalit's "argument" against what has no spiritual reality for him.  Milosz has his contradictions, Margalit his modesty.

But then there is Jaspers and his letters to Arendt.  Jaspers is in Luxembourg, already stripped of academic office, under a publishing ban, and he does not manage to get his wife, a Jew, to Switzerland.  Yet he will take exception to post-war legislation and exile himself to Basel.  With Husserl stripped, Jaspers stripped, Ricoeur heads off for a summer of '39 in Munich.

The little people, the mere readers, are to follow Ricoeur in his meanderings, in his distrust of science.  We could ignore Sartre, who knowingly took the philosophy teaching post of a sacked Jew, from whom there is almost nothing to be learned.  Almost nothing.

Then there are the elderly readers: new publishers spring up in Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig, publishing Festschrift and more, plump with a nostalgia for their old days in the DDR, all their plays produced, all their books in the schools, summer cottages, travel abroad.  We may have lingering hopes of transcendence, they had literature, quoting Northrop Frye and Marx and Stalin and never a mention of the Stasi.  No, "I regret having informed on your son, having over-heard him talking in his room to his friends when I was a guest in your home."  For that we have "The Lives of Others".

Ricoeur's lectures close with a false opposition of Levinas-Husserl.  There is a gap. The between.  The attentive reader knows that it is bridged for Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Taoist, Catholic, Protestant.

The real attack on science and technology is, I believe, actually an attack on science and history.  "Teknik" is a smokescreen, not unlike Leiss on "domination".  After a lifetime devoted to "lived experience" and "co-constitution", all that I have left is a confidence in poesis and a willingness to continue to read.  And a growing measure of disgust.

But there is also validation, when the reader recognizes in the learned author the same longing, the same nostalgia for the transcendent.  At that point the author must be trusted.

Missing from the Ricoeur narrative is the avowal of a past falsified, an apology to Gusdorf.  My only corrective is to re-read Beckett's "Murphy", Beckett having been a true hero of resistance.  Not just another liar, poseur, windbag.

The message of Ricoeur is that phenomenology will be of no avail.  I disagree.  We require now a phenomenology of combat, to understand how we came it embrace grapeshot, boiling tar, fragmentation grenades, landmines that only maim, machine guns.

One of the pioneers of powered flight could not bear that we would fly to murder.  Not kill in combat.  Murder.  The synchronization of machine gun with propeller was a major triumph.  Now we are faced with theocracies who are in pursuit of nuclear arms, an Islamic nation with nuclear arms which is only one step from theocracy.  A liar aims for the American Presidency and another liar occupies the highest effective office in the secular state of Turkey.  Turkey, whose armies were stopped at Vienna.

If we cannot embrace science and history without religion, ethics without religion, law without religion, then we may not be armed well enough to survive the collective slouch to reassuring fundamentalism.  Fundamentalism is not some marginal deviation.  It is the core.

Roman Catholics, Anglicans and Episcopalians would have us believe that we can have science and history and all the old certainty in the God who would watch a boy hang for a piece of bread, a girl buried alive. We can be reassured.  We must restore the strength of our institutions, ensure the soundness of our library collections, our curricula.

So far blind trust in a Bible-believing President has brought us only a war in Iraq after a botched effort against the Taliban. Distrust and suspicion was not enough to prevent a pointless war against an Iraqi dictator, a modest dictatorship when compared to North Korea, Cuba or China.  A war begun with remote-control missiles, cruise missiles.  A war that claims precision, but cannot perform an inventory of ammunition dumps (what could the rag-heads use artillery shells for anyway?)

When we read our political commentators for insight, when we try to form an opinion, we do go forward with a certain trust.  There is a rhetoric which ensures this trust.  To read the apologies for the old DDR and its writers and critics is a lesson I will not too soon forget.  And there is a rhetoric of the philosophers who write about "the really big questions" - especially those who seem to have no one answer, no system to offer us, such as Ricoeur, a Protestant, and Taylor, a Catholic.

With the doyen of American philosophers, Hilary Putnam, having made a complete tour of the positions available to him, the little people might be excused for believing that there is no progress in philosophy and that perhaps a theology which suits the President is not so disreputable after all.  Anthony Flew finds his God.  (it could be an effect of the aging brain and no President would confess a loss of faith.)  And we, the mere readers, are still waiting for even a small group of philosophers to emerge who are able to address those of us who are reluctant to concede that all and anything that separates us from the hominids before us is our brain anatomy and chemistry, our social relations of dominance and exchange, and behavior (linguistic and emotive.)

To read a philosopher and know him to have failed to address his greatest public failings (were the camps for Officers not public arenas with publishing? ) - to read that Gusdorf elided the profanity and obscenity that punctuates military speech - and then you have heard the man.  Ricoeur was sent to make amends at a school which had been exemplary during the war.  Knowing what we now know about the extent of French collaboration - knowing something of how very differently the Poles comported themselves - perhaps the University of Chicago needs to reflect on the buffoons and worse whom it has ensconced on occasion: beginning with Tillich, Arendt, Eliade, Ricoeur and now Taylor.

I was taught that what was different about the Kennedy administration is that he brought in brains from Chicago.  Now we have a taste of Chicago in the White House and a President, a lawyer, who may still consider a vague theology and disreputable sermons to be somehow more fundamental than science and history.

Einstein claimed that science cannot give you the taste of the soup.  In many ways he was wrong, as our new views of beaches, clouds and human feeling amply demonstrate.  Professors assure their students that philosophy is not about the meaning of life, but also guide their best students away from disciplines such as history and philosophy of history, literature and philosophy of literature risking that those fields can tolerate mediocre efforts with little harm.

Major universities use their endowments to help ensure that work that is deserving of publication is published and often that every notebook and every set of lecture notes appears in bound collected works.  Most of us will only see the volumes that were aimed at the intelligent reader, the discerning reader (although the need to translate German and French texts for English markets might lead you to wonder how serious those readers are thought to be, unilingual, under-educated or merely language-challenged.)

Translations of lectures by a philosopher, published by a university press, suggest that this work merits reading.  With few books of philosophy finding their way into American public libraries, my copy of The Course of Recognition from hclib.org might yet be replaced by Le Parcours from a participating inter-library loan institution.  I wonder: were these lectures a strange avowal of his personal need and of his feeling of being threatened given what befell Eliade?  Did he see himself in a portrayal by Bellow?  Had his wife died without knowing why a Croix de Guerre with such connections had been consigned to resume teaching in a backwater?  Had we known, would there have been an interdiction?  Should there have been?

My own suspicion is that Ricoeur had read pre-war writing of Jaspers that were easily misread.  Mikel Dufrenne is gone, Gusdorf is gone, and so we, mere readers, not scholars, may never have an answer.  On the shelf behind, first to hand, the books of Paul Ricoeur.  Books on almost everything ever dear to me.  Husserl.  Metaphor.  Narrative.  Freud.  Books in which the author's best hunch, his hard-earned insight, his daring direction, are essential to the reader and his reading and what he shapes from this reading in his very own speech and thought and musings.  In what he advises his children, his friends.  Imperfect.  Flawed.  But not "essentially" flawed?

In these writers there can be no separation of the writer from his work.  This is not science, this is not history, this is not mathematics.  They do not offer an argument, a line of argument, from which you might divorce them, abstract them.  They are in the lineage of Lessing, Nietzsche and Heidegger - they must themselves be read - and any unadvised reader will be hostage to the translator.

If we were to discover evidence that Jeshua, the Nazarene, a stone-cutter, had left behind a wife somewhere along the Ganges, the wife who taught him to speak and ensured more work for him, his father, his brothers, would that, could that, now be irrelevant?  If the Vietnamese on the Chinese wife of Ho are any indication, it is not so.  This would not be youthful indiscretion.  Behold the man.