Paul Ricoeur and Philosophical Anthropology
Paul Ricoeur explored his philosophical anthropology in Freedom and Nature (1950), Fallible Man (1960), and Symbolism of Evil (1960). The design of this essay is to think along with him on these matters.
The nature of voluntary motion and consent create the possibilities, the undifferentiated keyboard, that is the human being. We need to explore how this is the case. We can pursue this theme best if we bracket the domain of human fault. This bracketing allows a focus upon the will.
We can begin with our sense of space. Intentionality, which is a decision we make that relates us to an object or project in the world, means that humanity is not reducible to elementary actions in the brain or to genetics. Such a decision is a judgment, designating one project or object and not others. Deciding is taking a position in relation to the world. We adopt a project to bring change in our world. We take responsibility for this position and for the project we adopt. I can do what I decide. This voluntary motion suggests that we have power. We become the agent of our intentions. The acceptance of responsibility is the basis of the consciousness of being cause, agent, or author. The concept of action in the sense of authorship presupposes the concept of responsibility.[1]
We can then consider our sense of time. Each decision moves us toward a project that has a temporal structure, so to decide is to anticipate. Our intentionality moves us toward the future. Perception itself occurs in anticipation, through glimpses and clues. Anticipation retains the past. The future is the fundamental situation for the decision and project. The future is a condition for action. Future contingencies opens up possibility. The presence of consciousness means that the possible precedes the actual. Possibility requires the project and the power or ability to do it. Further, presence to my self is a condition for deciding and intentionality. I project myself into the action to be done. I throw myself ahead in anticipation of the completion of the project. I meet myself in my project. I cannot exile or isolate myself from the power of acting and willing. The self I will be is not already given from the past but opens before me as a possibility in action and decision.
This discussion of motion and consent leads us to consider the nature of the human will. To reflect on the motivation of willing is to suggest that willing has its reasons. To give a reason is to justify or legitimize and thus make a value judgment. Values appear to me as I act and involve myself in projects. A space opens in the possible, a gap appears in history. While the body has many involuntary drives, I do not give up my responsibility to take a stand toward it, to evaluate it, and exercise control. Wisdom is at the intersection of will and bodily need. We even sacrifice need for other ends. Pleasure occurs in perception, and thus hardly involuntary. It is an achievement. Pleasure identifies “this is good.”
The demand for justice recognizes that the Other counts as against me, that the opinions and values of the Other proceed from a perspective and valuation that has equal dignity to me. This de-centering is both obligation and attraction. I humble the self. This intersubjectivity becomes a way of practicing values that become attractive rather than simply obligatory. I find myself completed in community.
Hesitation suggests the capability for choice. Hesitation is seeking a choice. Choice becomes fixing one’s attention among various projects. Deliberation follows. Then one makes a choice that completes a process and breaks it off at the same time. Choice resolves deliberation (classical) or irruption of a project (existential). The latter emphasizes discontinuity and irrational. The act itself reconciles the two. The act is both resolution of a deliberation and thus brings one into agreement with oneself and irrupts into a decision involving risk.
However, we need to reconsider this discussion when we introduce the notion of human fault. We best begin with a philosophical reflection on myth in religion, for this allows us to consider the passage from innocence to fault. The history of religions contains myths of fall, chaos, exile, and divine blinding. The philosopher cannot immediately insert them into philosophical discourse. Exegeting such myths prepares them for an insertion into human self-knowledge. Exploring the symbolism of evil is the initial step toward bringing myths nearer to philosophical discourse. Exploring the theme of fallibility, the constitutional weakness of humanity, allows us to explore how such fallibility is the path by which evil becomes possible. With the concept of fallibility, an understanding of humanity becomes intelligible.
The symbol gives thought. Any notion of guilt, for example, needs to pass through an encounter with psychoanalysis, criminology, and political philosophy. The theme of alienation we find in Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx is connected to the accusation made by the prophets of Israel. If thought starting from symbols unfolds by its encounter with these modern disciplines, philosophical discourse needs to lead to the speculative equivalent of the mythical themes of fall, exile, chaos, and tragic blinding, the notion of a free will that is bound and finds itself already bound. Such will be the theme that results in the philosophical consideration that the symbol gives to thought.
This philosophy begins with belief and through reflection leads to knowledge. It is nourished on the fullness of language. This does away with the concern for finding a starting-point for philosophy. It recognizes the narrow perspective of modern science and technology as forgetting something important about humanity and the sacred. Its precise, univocal, and technical language needs to be recharged with the fullness of language. The symbol gives, but what it gives is something to think about.[2]
The grandeur and limitation of an ethical vision of the world becomes the theme of this portion of philosophical anthropology. In all hypotheses, evil manifests itself through the constitutional weakness of humanity. Freedom that assumes the responsibility for evil is freedom that comes to a self-understanding filled with meaning. In this ethical vision, freedom is the ground of evil. The confession of evil is also the condition of the consciousness of freedom. In this confession one can detect the delicate connection of the past and the future, of the self and its acts, of non-being and pure action, which are at the core of freedom. Such is the grandeur of an ethical vision of the world. Reflection on the symbolism of evil reaches its peak in the ethical vision of the world.[3]
The myth of the fall is the matrix of all subsequent speculations concerning the origin of evil in human freedom. The exegesis of this myth brings out a tension between two significations. Evil comes into the world as far as humanity posits it. However, to it must be added the powerful myths of chaos, tragic blinding, and of the exiled soul. thus, humanity posits evil because humanity yields to the siege of the Adversary.
The task of philosophic reflection is to recapture the symbolism of evil, to extend these reflections into all the domains of human consciousness. What the symbolism of evil gives to thought concerns the grandeur and limitation of any ethical vision of the world. Humanity is as much a victim as it is guilty.
Philosophical reflection considers the concept of fallibility as part of the innermost structure of human reality. Humanity is fragile and liable to evil. This means a certain non-coincidence of the human being with oneself. This disproportion of self to self would be the explanation of fallibility. To be clear, this way of considering the human condition allows us to avoid placing humanity in a fanciful domain, an intermediary place, such as between being and nothingness, between angels and animals. This suggests that humanity is the only being so unstable in ontological constitution that it is capable of being both greater and lesser than itself. The value of looking at humanity this way is that the existing individual is intermediate within oneself. Humanity is bounded by unlimited rationality, totality, and beatitude on the one hand and limited to a perspective, consigned to death, and riveted to desire on the other. This pathos of humanity involves a pre-comprehension of human misery.
The origin of evil and wickedness is in the passage from the structure of human finitude to actual living through decisions of the will. The structure of human finitude includes the possibility of fall. Its irrational character means that only symbolic language makes it accessible. This is true because of the process of abstraction in which we have engaged, in which we have bracketed the notion of fallibility to develop a philosophy of the will. A structural element of the human form of life and behavior is marked by a tension between the centralist organization that human beings share with all animal life and the exocentric character that is peculiar to human beings. The human situation is characterized by the disproportion in the life of a being that is finite and oriented to an infinite destiny. This non-coincidence of humanity with itself is not yet evil, but points to fallibility of the condition. This suggests that the failure to achieve one’s destiny is inherently connected with the factual natural conditions of human existence. This modifies the notion that evil originates in an act of human freedom.[4]
The first stage of an anthropology of disproportion is the passage between our finitude and infinite possibility. We next need to examine the power of human knowing, especially as it allows us to reflect upon the human characteristics of action and feeling. My body opens me to the world by everything it can do. The world is a correlate to my existence. Human receptivity constitutes the openness of this finite one to the world. Our primary relation to the world is to receive. Such receptivity consists in our openness to the world. The body is the original “here” for us. This primal finitude consists in perspective or point of view, which affects our primary relation to the world. In recognizing that all perception is perspectival, I escape my perspective in my recognition that others have their perspective as well. I am so immersed in the world that I lose any attempted aloofness that is the principle of speech. The objective character of the objects in the world results from their ontological mode of things. The objects are thrown before me, given to my perspective and communicated in language. The objective character of the object consists in its expressible character. Thus, using imagination, I become a synthesis of speech and perspective. This synthesis between meaning and appearance, between speaking and looking, is consciousness, which has unity only outside of self in its reflection on the world. All this keeps us from simply beginning with a philosophy of the person, which will lead us to falling into the fanciful ontology of being and nothingness.
The second stage of an anthropology of disproportion is the passage from the theoretical to the practical, from a theory of knowledge to a theory of will, from “I think” to “I will, I desire, I can.” Our philosophical reflection leaves the abstract, bare, and empty, and becomes practical in dealing with limitation of our life-world, dealing with values and counter-values, and thus make it difficult. The allure of a total philosophical reflection on the life-world is strong but deceptive, but we need to be willing to linger between what is and that total vision.
First, character is how we will arrive at a practical finitude that we can understand based on the notion of perspective. All the aspects of finitude can be regrouped under the idea of finite perspective. By beginning with the affective perspective, we begin with things that appear interesting to me, through which we grasp the lovable, the attractive, the hateful, and the repulsive, which are the anticipatory stages of the project. In this case, desire brings clarity, for it brings intentionality that arises out of a lack of and becomes a drive toward, suggesting the elective character of desire. Desire is illuminates its aim through the representation and elucidation of the absent thing, as well as the obstacles that block its attainment. It anticipates pleasure and pain, joy and sadness, in being joined to or separated from the object of desire. To find oneself in a certain mood is to feel one’s individuality as inexpressible and incommunicable. Every desire for an object involves a feeling, love, and choice, of oneself. The practical perspective leads recognizes that habit fixes our tastes and aptitudes and shrinks our field of availability, but that such hardening of life bids us to look for the new mode of finitude intermingled with the spontaneity of life and will. Character arises out of perspective, desire, the choice of self, and habit. Character is the finite openness of my existence to the life-world. Character is a limitation. In one sense, nothing human is foreign to me. I am capable of every virtue and every vice. Character is how I see humanity from somewhere, from a certain angle, and a partial wholeness of the life-world. In this sense, character does not change. No spiritual movement or radical conversion will not make us into different individuals, even if our lives may be oriented by a new constellation of fixed stars.
Second, happiness is how we will arrive at a practical infinitude that we can understand based the notion of meaning. All the aspects of infinitude can be regrouped under the idea of meaning. A disproportion arises between character and happiness. A theoretical concept of meaning considers the supreme good, that for whose sake everything else is done. Happiness is a termination of destiny and not an end of desire. The encounters of our life that are most worthy of being called events indicate the direction of happiness. Happiness removes obstacles and uncovers a vast landscape of existence, an excess of meaning. Happiness directs me toward the very thing that reason demands.
Third, the constitution of the person by means of the moral feeling of respect is how we will arrive at the practical mediation that extends the mediation of the imagination. Respect is the fragile synthesis that constitutes the form of the person. The synthesis of happiness and character is found in the person, first of oneself and then of others. The forming of person is life-long project. Human fragility arises again, which will lead to a phenomenology of fallibility. I set before me the formation of me as a person, and this becomes my project. This project is the formation of our humanity. Desire is directed toward happiness as a totality of meaning and contentment. The project of forming a person is an end that at the same tome be an existence. The self is given as an intention. Being human, learning to be human, is a path of treating oneself and others as human. The person is the synthesis of reason and existence, of end and of presence. All this suggests the fragile experience of forming a person. An ethical vision of the world presupposes a fallen sensibility of humanity. This suggests a loss of innocence that we can name as a lapse, a loss, or a fall. I am divided against myself, a disproportion that underlies the practical existence of human beings. The structure of fallibility makes this possible. Respect is rooted in a desire for rationality.
The deep root of egocentricity is clear in our natural organization and in our sensible perception. Our perspective shows itself in the actions of human life, including self-love, being an expression of human finitude that must be distinguished from actual fault. This position would be justified if the ego were constantly mindful of the limitations of its perspective at any given moment and thus, by the fact of admitting these limits, were at the same time to transcend them. the transcendental synthesis of object-perception the ego does at the same time transcend the limits of its perspectives in that it is set among the things of the world. This means that egocentricity makes its appearance in human life long before we can consider moral behavior. it determines the whole way in which we experience the world. Perspective and transgression are the two poles of a single function of openness. However, in its anticipation of things as well as in its reaching out to happiness the finite go is constantly taking as definitive reality what is in only a finite perspective, and this self-enclosed perspective, which is not aware of its own finitude, is an expression of human fault. Therefore, sin is intricately connected with the natural conditions of our existence.[5]
All this will lead to a new analysis that shows the fragility of this practical mediation of respect for which the person is the correlative.
An important aspect of this philosophical reflection is that myth in religion anticipates a philosophical reflection on the misery of humanity. A philosophy of feeling leads us to an investigation of human fallibility. With feeling, we have the moment that reveals a new sense of human disproportion. Passion may well be the transition through which human beings must pass to move from physical life to a life of reason. Passion both unites and separates vital affectivity or desire with Eros. Modern philosophy needs to recover this insight of Plato (Symposium, Republic). This represents a move from the theoretical to the practical to the affective, developing a philosophical anthropology that is more inward and fragile. The restless heart would be the fragile moment of disproportion that culminates in the reflection on happiness and character. The paradox involved is that a philosophy of the heart needs to bring passion to the level of reason that faces the demands of our life world. It is a movement from an abstraction to the real. Philosophy needs to step out of the ivory tower and into life as human beings live it. A philosophy of feeling will express the fragility of the intermediate nature of our lives, deal with the gap between the intellectual sense of disproportion and the lived experience of misery.
One question we must face is that of method, of whether a philosophy of feeling is possible. The primary point here is that feeling and knowing explain each other. They reveal themselves in intentional analysis. Feeling involves love or hate of something, which makes it intentional. The paradox of feeling is how the same experience designates a thing-quality and at the same time reveal the inwardness of the “I.” knowing sets a cleavage between the object and the subject, while feeling manifests a relation to the world that restores our complicity with it. Feeling manifests itself through affective tones in the things our desires move us toward and from which we withdraw. Here are the lovable, the hateful, the easy, the difficult, the desirable, the loathsome, the sad, and the joyous. This shows the privileged status of feeling, as shown in both behavioristic and depth psychology. Feeling is the unity of an intention toward the world and an affection of the self. Feeling reveals the connection of my existence with beings and being through desire and love.
A second question is that of substance, of a completion of the meditation on disproportion in the dimension of feeling. If feeling manifests aims, it adds a new dimension to human reality. Feeling manifests its meaning by contrast with the work of knowing, for its function is to interiorize the reality of the life-world we experience. Feeling divides in two through the mode of inner conflict. The reflection on disproportion comes to center itself on passion, which situates itself between desire and reason and whose specific desire is Eros. The disproportion of feeling is that of vital or sensuous desire and intellectual love, which we might call spiritual joy. The heart feels the discrepancy. A psychology of feeling is blind without the philosophy of reason. The infinitude of feeling gains clarity in a philosophy of discourse. The Heart is the realm of the interpersonal schemata of being-with as well as the super-personal schemata of being-for and the intention of being-in, which would express itself as greed without the polarity of Care, which is the openness or availability to the life-world. Feeling anticipates more than it gives, it promises more than gives an actual possession. Mood is the proper designation of such feeling. Schematized as delight, joy, exultation, serenity, they have formless character that denotes feeling and denotes the openness of the human being to the life-world. Heidegger focused upon the mood of anguish, the underside of absence and distance, while neglecting the power of beatitude and joy in and through anguish. In this gap we are confronted with the disproportion in the dimension of feeling and the source of human affective fragility.
A trilogy of passion (Kant, Anthropology) shows how passion shows itself. In the passion for possession or having, we can see the disproportion of the innocent quest for having, by which the “I” constitutes itself by designating that which is mine, with greed, avarice, envy, and so on. The mediation of the “we” and the “our,” the “I” joins itself to a “mine.” The passion of domination or power shows itself in work and economic arrangements under the reflection of the human spirit we find in political realm. The passion for honor or esteem, the quest for worth in the eyes of another.
We have been pursuing disproportion through knowing, acting, and feeling, this last revealing human fragility. The heart is what is restless in me. Feeling reveals human fragility through passion. When will I have enough? When will my authority be adequately grounded? When will I be sufficiently appreciated and recognized? Quite simply, the desire of desire has no end. Yet, feeling also binds what knowing separates. Feeling binds me to things, to others, and to self. Knowing sets a world over against me, while feeling unites intentionality to the affection through which I feel myself existing.
We have been moving toward an understanding of humanity as fallible, which means that the possibility of moral evil is inherent in the constitution of humanity. This possibility does not exist simply because human beings are finite (Leibniz), nor does it exist simply because of human weakness of bridging the gap between the possible and the real. The philosophical anthropology elucidated thus far has stopped short of taking the leap from fallibility to recognizing that humanity has already fallen. To catch sight of this leap we will need to explore the symbolism of evil. Fragility is the capacity for evil. To say that humanity is fallible is to say that the limitation peculiar to the human being, who does not coincide with oneself, is the primordial weakness from which evil arises. Evil arises from this weakness only because it is posited, a paradox we must explore.
We now need to consider the transition from the possibility of evil in humanity to its reality, and thus, from the reality of human fallibility to whether human fault is reality. We travel this path by re-enacting in ourselves the confession of human sin and evil that occurs in the religious consciousness. The reason that it is the most inarticulate expression of the confession of evil, and therefore, it is of philosophic interest. the experience of which the penitent makes confession is a blind experience embedded in the matrix of emotion, fear, and anguish. Confession expresses the emotion that without it would be shut within in itself. language is the light of the emotions. Through confession the consciousness of fault is brought into the light of speech. The confession of sin reveals several layers of experience. Feeling of guilt points to the experience of sin, which includes all human beings and indicates the real situation of humanity before God, whether individuals know it or not. The original sense of sin is that of defilement, conceived of as a stain or blemish that infects human beings from the outside. The acknowledgement in the confession of sin is an experience of being oneself while also alienated form oneself. Sin is an alienation from oneself, an experience that is more astonishing, disconcerting, and scandalous than the spectacle of nature. Guilt, defilement, and sin is the living experience of fault put into language. Yet, this language, as primitive and as devoid of myth as it may be, is already symbolic language. The consciousness of self constitutes itself through symbolism. The elementary language of confession will be an important contribution to a philosophy of human fault.
Three dimensions of symbolism are cosmic of nature, nocturnal dreams, and the poetic word. They are present in every authentic symbol. The philosophic significance becomes intelligible only if it relates to these three dimensions of symbols. The work of Eliade is helpful in the cosmic dimension. Freud and depth psychology of Jung is helpful in exploring symbolism in dreams. The poetic imagination is close to the word in that it puts language in a state of emergence. Symbols are signs. Every sign aims at something beyond itself. the literal meaning constitutes the symbolic meaning. Symbol precede interpretation, while allegories are already interpretation. Symbols are analogical meanings that form spontaneously and are significant. Thus, an analogue of stain is the symbol of defilement, the analogue of deviation is symbol of sin, and the analogue of accusation is the symbol of guilt. Such symbols give rise to thought. The religious consciousness discloses relations in depth, the thickness and the transparency of present motivations. The conception of fault as defilement is a good example of this. The lateral relation focuses upon likeness and unlikeness with other ways of thought, the retroactive relation re-considers the past, which can lead to restoration of lost intermediaries and later suppression of distance.
Accusation is presumed in the Kantian ethical imperative. At the center of this symbolic system is the dominating figure of the paternal or Oedipus complex. The agency of accusation is the superego, representing the external world. If we are to demystify this dynamic, it will move from the morality of obligation to an ethics of the desire to or effort to exist. Obligation is not the primary structure of ethics. In locating ethical reflection in the identity of effort and desire, we acknowledge self-dividedness, lack, desire for the other. This desire would not project value into the heavens, where it becomes an idol. The kerygmatic moment of ethics needs to be recovered, and it can do so by focusing upon desire in ethics. Theology deals with relations of intelligibility in the domain of witness. Philosophy organizes in terms of the human desire to be. Philosophy recognizes at this point the ethical function of religion and the representative content of religion in the good principle as an archetype. The philosophical question is how human desire is oriented by this representation. This leads us to think of evil as a kerygmatic problem. Guilt is the result of accusation that occurs in the light of the promise in the kerygma. The religious dimension of evil is not transgression. Demystifying accusation leads us to the feeling of guilt. Guilt progresses over the threshold of injustice and the sin of injustice. This removes the sexual from the center of a reflection on guilt, away from the parental agency, and toward the figure of the prophet who is outside the family. Wisdom rectifies the guilt, taken up again and transposed into reflective thought. Behind accusation and consolation is the anger of love, a grieving the Spirit.[6]
The symbolism of evil in humanity results in the philosophic concept of the servile will, and in turn represents the concept of fallibility. It tries to raise the symbolism of evil to the level of speculation. It does so through the symbols of defilement, guilt, and sin. The attempt here is to re-enact in imagination and sympathetically the experience of fault.
Here is where an interaction with psychoanalysis can challenge us toward an insight regarding the symbolism of evil.[7] Psychoanalysis has a functional approach to symbols, it views the symbols as an illusion that deals with the harshness of life, which leads to understanding the symbols only in relation to their origin. It is a genetic explanation of religion. Religion is the reappearance of forgotten images of the human and individual past. This return of the forgotten, in the form of fantasy, is like the return of the repressed in the obsessional neurotic. In contrast, a phenomenology of religion will focus on the interpretation of its objects, it will explore the fullness of the symbols to reveal their truth, and it orients itself to a recollection of the sacred. We need to find our way toward the legitimacy of both approaches within their context. Exploring the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious might be one way to do this. Psychoanalysis is right in saying that we must arrive at consciousness, which demystifies the privileged status of consciousness. We do not know ourselves immediately, and the pretension that we do is a sign of our narcissism. Consciousness is a task in which we become increasingly conscious. The question becomes how the self emerges from childhood and moves through the successive stages of a human life. The best way to pursue this movement is not through the reductionism of Freud but through the phenomenology of Spirit we find in Hegel. This is a synthetic and progressive movement toward Spirit. Every figure receives its meaning from the one that follows it. The truth of one moment resides in the subsequent moment. Intelligibility proceeds from the end to the beginning, which supports the idea that consciousness is a task. The task of philosophic reflection is the work of deciphering symbols. For philosophy to discover itself, it must pass through an exploration of representations, actions, works, institutions, and monuments that are the works of the ego. The ego must lose itself in its works to find itself. considering that reflection is a reappropriation of our effort to exist, it is practical and ethical rather than epistemological. Philosophy is ethical as far as it transforms alienation into freedom and beauty. We desire to be by means of works that testify to this effort and this desire to exist. Such effort and desire are affirmed only by works whose meaning remains uncertain and revocable. We must conclude that the exploration of symbols immerses us in a hermeneutic conflict, for reflection both an archaeology and an eschatology of consciousness. Reflection requires a reductive and destructive interpretation because consciousness is at first a false consciousness. Yet, reflection also must also take the form of a restoration of the sacred. The meaning of consciousness is not in itself but in Spirit, in the succession of figures that draw consciousness forward away from itself. In contrast to Hegel, however, the end of reflection is only a promise, for the problem of evil will always form an obstruction for philosophical reflection.
Sin involves a violated relation, such as missing the mark, deviation, rebellion, straying from the path. It suggests error. Pardon leads to return or restoration of the relation. It leads to redeeming the narrative. One held captive by sin means the problem of human existence will be that of liberation, of salvation and redemption.
Guilt points us to the paradox of the idea of human fault in which one is responsible for being captive, which is the definition of a servile will. Guilt expresses itself through the indirect symbol of captivity, a symbol of derived from a theology of history in which a people are made prisoner through their sins. The symbol of the enslaved body in Romans 6 is an act and a state, which makes all human beings without excuse. In Plato (Phaedo, 82d-e), the bodily captivity is a sign of the servile will, the prison of the body being the work of desire and one cooperates in putting on the chains. To be lost is to be in the self-captivity of the bonds of desire.
The principle that the concept of guilt presupposes a transgression of a norm is also documented in the history of culture, where the perception of this relationship precedes the development of guilt consciousness and the internalization of this consciousness. This origin for the guilt idea is important for the structure of its themes. The internalization of guilt is important, but the objectivity of the stain is retained in the idea of sin and is presupposed in guilt as well. Defilement and impurity are close to the Old Testament representations of sin and guilt, suggested in a continuity from act to consequence and from crime to disaster and death. Sin as a violation of provisions of the divine law is not everywhere as intensely personalized as it seems to be.[8]
Guilt places oneself before an invisible tribunal that measures the offense, pronounces condemnation, and inflicts punishment. It does so within the realm of the moral consciousness that watches, judges, and condemns. This interior tribunal incriminates the consciousness, mingled with the anticipation of punishment in the form of self-observation, self-accusation, and self-condemnation. Guilt arises with a scrupulous consciousness, which is a delicate and precise consciousness enamored by increasing perfection. I declare myself as being one who could have done otherwise. I recognize my obligation in my awareness that I should have done otherwise. It recognizes the obligation contained in the ethical demand upon my life. At this point, however, the freedom and obligation reflected in the experience of guilt receives an answer to resituate my existence in the light of hope, which becomes the passion for the possible (Kierkegaard), which strengthens the imprint of the promise on freedom. Freedom in the light of hope is a freedom that affirms itself despite death and is willing to even deny death. Repentance is already directed toward this future. Evil is not simply transgression of a law but a pretension of humanity toward being master of one’s life. Faith incorporates the hope of the end of evil, in the law of superabundance, that where sin abounded, grace abounded even more. Thus, faith leads to a benevolent view of humanity and its history. It takes the step from condemnation to mercy and enters the perspective of coming rule of God.[9]
Guilt also expresses itself through the indirect symbol of infection and lead to the notion of the servile will. Defilement is a power of darkness that needs to be taken way or expiated. Defilement is an objective event, for it infects by contact. This is why sexual expression is so prominent in discussions of purity legislation and in ethics. Purity and virginity have a deep connection for this reason. However, an ethics of justice and love will need to be pursued and then circle back to sexual expression. The point of expiation is to reaffirm order. Expiation aims at the restoration of the personal worth of the guilty person through a just punishment. Defilement is external to humanity and thereby freedom is taken captivity. Fearing defilement, humanity fears the negative judgment of the transcendent before which humanity cannot stand. This something that infects is a dread that anticipates the unleashing of avenging wrath. The infection is a symbol of the servile will in that it is a bad choice that binds itself. The seduction comes from the outside and is an affection of the self by the self, a self-infection, by which the act of binding oneself transforms into the state of being bound. Both symbols turn inward to express a freedom that enslaves itself. They are symbols when they reveal a situation that is centered in the relation of oneself to oneself. The symbol expresses the paradox of a captive free will. Deliverance from this situation is the central theme of salvation. Yet, to infect is not to destroy. It tarnishes but does not ruin. Regardless of how powerful and seductive evil may be, it cannot make humanity something other than itself. Evil may well be a radical evil (Kant), but it cannot undo primordial goodness.
The externality of evil is important for the moments when human beings identify themselves with the good, which is likewise something objective in their eyes. The difficulty is that the identification is not a stable one. The image of contagion or contamination is vague at this point, for it surrenders too much to the thesis of the externality of evil, thereby suggesting that apart from this contamination human beings are in themselves healthy. We need to clarify at this point by affirming the power of the lie that says good is evil and evil good and deceptively offers us life as the reward for sin, when in fact the outcome of sin is death. This deceitful character of sin enables us to understand how human beings can nonetheless choose what is objectively evil by compulsion. This means the servile will consists in that human beings regard as good what is objectively bad for them and therefore choose it. This situation makes it clear that human beings are the kind of beings who can find pleasure in what is objectively evil.[10]
Punishment itself is a moment in the process of the cancellation of the stain or pollution of sin. In the judicial realm, punishment arises out of the idea of the free will and acknowledges the validity that one ought to be a person and respect others as persons. It acknowledges the contractual arrangement of the political order in which one lives. The violation of the rule is an injustice to which punishment responds. This punishment recognizes the criminal as a rational being who as acknowledged the ethical demand even while violating it. It separates the judging consciousness and the judged consciousness. This separation reveals the judging consciousness as hypocritical and hard, and it is the judging consciousness that must find its way out of the hell of punishment. This conflict can thus be resolved only as we move toward reconciliation and pardon. However, this means we are moving from the judicial sphere of the political order to the realm of morality and religion. This is why we cannot moralize or divinize punishment. Punishment sanctions distance between the judge and the judged, but transcending punishment leads to reconciliation and the language of forgiveness in religion or to community in the language of public morality. This leads to the law of superabundance (Kierkegaard). The late notion of covenant in ancient Israel can lead us to this law. The legal dimension of this covenant in Torah does not exhaust its meaning, as we can see in Hosea and Isaiah, as both prophets could refer to the conjugal metaphor for this covenant. The notion of justification in Paul reveals the absurd logic (Kierkegaard) of the gospel at this point. The law pretends to give life gives only death. The concept of law destroys itself and the whole cycle of notions that govern it: judgment, condemnation, and punishment, which are now under the sign of death. The logic of punishment contrasts with proclamation of the gospel, for the justice of God is manifested without the law (Rom 3:21). It is still justice, but the justice that gives life. Of anger, condemnation, and death we know that in Jesus Christ we have been delivered from them. When we have crossed the border into grace, we can look back on what we have been exempted from. This is the logic of superabundance. The logic of punishment is the logic of equivalence, for the wages of sin is death, but the logic of grace is a logic of surplus and excess shown in the folly of the cross. The gospel itself finishes the myth of punishment. Punishment is a memorial of a transcended past which does not have the status of illusion or that of an eternal law of truth. The theologies of vicarious satisfaction remain theologies of punishment rather than gift and grace. Punishment marks an epoch that remains a memorial in the preaching of the gospel, even while its myth has been shattered.[11]
What we can see is that the internalization of guilt consciousness means that the diminution of the value of existence that culprits experience calls by its nature for punishment in the sense of penance, or expiation that educates. Punishment acquires a new function in that of restoring the identity of the culprit. Conscience as a solitary experience becomes the measure of evil. However, we need to modify this with the notion that culprits must answer for the consequences of their actions. Blame is attributed to them independently of whether they admit their guilt and acknowledge their actions as faulty. Consequently, guilt in the sense of an attribution of blame exist prior to and independently of the development of a subjective consciousness of guilt. The history of Israel shows this, for it could distinguish between deliberate an undeliberate act in the Book of the Covenant, among its earliest documents, and the subjective internalization of the consciousness of guilt as a break in the relation to God coming only with the preaching of the prophets centuries later. The assignment of blame is for the sake of the community and its purification. Guilt consciousness is based on the readiness to answer for its consequences. The culprit accepts guilt, a process that begins in confessing fault, thereby becoming the author of the act. Analogous motives are present in Greek tragic poetry, which initiated the development leading to the formation of the idea of an individual conscience.[12]
The developed language of myth will make an important contribution of a modern understanding of human fault. Myth is already logos, although it is a false logos. Myth is a traditional narration that relates to events that happened at the beginning of time, and which has the purpose of providing grounds for the ritual actions of people of today and establishing all the forms of action and thought by which humanity understands itself in this world. Myth cannot be an explanation for the modern person. Modern humanity can recognize the myth as myth because this culture has reached the point where history and myth separate. However, myth reveals its exploratory signification and its contribution to understanding, which is its symbolic function, since it has the power to discover and reveal the bond between humanity and what humanity considers sacred. When myth is demythologized through contact with scientific history, and elevated in the dignity of a symbol, it can become a dimension of modern thought. Thus, mythical time can no longer be coordinated with the time of events that are historical as established by historical method and historical criticism, and mythical space can no longer coordinated with the places of our geography. As modern persons, we lose the myth as immediate logos, but we rediscover it as myth. The philosophical exploration of myth creates the possibility for a new reversal of circumstances out of which logos may reappear for the modern person. Myth does so through the way it speaks of the beginning and the end of evil.
Given our topic is the symbolism of evil, we will limit ourselves to a group of mythical symbols that concern human evil. Evil, defilement, or sin is the sensitive point, the crisis of this bond that myth makes explicit in its own way. Evil is the crucial experience of the sacred in which the threat of the dissolution of the bond between humanity and the sacred makes us most intensely aware of human dependence on the powers of the sacred. The myth of this crisis is that it places before human beings a complete understanding of humanity, giving both the orientation and the meaning of humanity from its narration. The completeness of the narration is that myth narrates a reminiscence and an expectation. Thus, it must embrace humanity in one ideal history, as does the Hebrew notion of Adam and the Christian understanding of the significance of Adam in Paul. One can refer to humanity as a unity because myth sums up the human type. This universality has the character of movement by narration, in recounting the beginning and the end of fault, thereby conferring upon this experience an orientation, a character, a tension. The narration encompasses beginnings and eschatology. Myth discloses essential history of humanity from its perdition to its salvation. The most significant aspect of myth is that it seeks to get at the enigma of human existence, the discordance between original innocence and the existence of human beings as defiled, sinful, and guilty. Myth accounts for this transition by its narrative. It points to the relation, the leap and the passage, between the essential being of humanity and the historical existence of humanity.
Myth is pseudo-rational for the modern person, but that is not fatal to myth, although it is fatal to knowledge. Plato provides an example in that he inserts myth into his dialogues without confusing myth with knowledge. The problem of evil is the occasion of the passage from myth to knowledge. The problem of evil presents a considerable challenge to think and a deceptive invitation to talk nonsense. In this case, the ends of reason exceed the means. The contradiction felt between the destination of humanity and the actual evil situation of humanity is acknowledged and confessed, giving rise to the gigantic question of why at the center of human existence. It was out of this question that the narratives of myth arose.
The symbol opens and discloses a dimension of experience that would remain closed and hidden without it. It occurs in language and the symbol takes the form of narration. It expresses an inclusive mode of behavior relative to the life-world of human existence. It is in the rite rather than in the narration that this behavior is expressed most completely. Ritual action and mythical language point beyond themselves to a model or archetype that they imitate or repeat in gestures and verbal repetition, becoming the broken expressions of a living participation in the mythical time and space narrated. The significance of this mythical structure is that those participating in the ritual acknowledge the lost wholeness of human existence and seeks its recovery through re-enactment and imitation of the myth and the rite. Myth-making is an antidote to distress and anxiety that reflects the unhappy consciousness. The narration has the character of a drama because the mythical consciousness does not experience fullness to which the myth relates in its narration of the beginning and the end of this mythical history. The characteristics of the myths of evil include the universality conferred upon human experience through archetypal personages, the tension of an ideal history oriented from a beginning toward an end, and the transition from an essential nature of humanity to an alienated human existence. The myth performs its symbolic function by narration because it wants to express is already a drama. The totality of meaning and the cosmic drama are the two keys that will unlock the myths of the beginning and the end.
The primary myth is the Adamic myth and the eschatological vision of history, for the Jewish and Christian scripture and tradition still proclaim this myth. We do not consider this myth as if it is a mime of rationality, a rationalized symbol, rejecting the temptation of a dogmatic mythology that would interpret it is history or science. Such fundamentalism has done a great disservice to exploring the meaning of the myth. Such a view pursues the intellectually inconsistent idea of combining two universes of discourse, that of ethics and biology.[13] It represents the origin and the end of evil. The idea of a fall of humanity arises in an irrational event in a completed creation. It presents a cleavage between the irrational event of the fall the ancient drama of creation. Salvation becomes historical and presented as a temporal drama. Salvation is the sum of the initiatives of the divine and of the believer tending toward the elimination of evil. The eschatological representation means that the work of salvation is still pending until the Last Day. The fall supervened upon a perfect creation, meaning the event of the fall carries the weight of this mythology. As an etiological myth, it relates the origin of evil to an ancestor of humanity whose condition is similar with our time and space, which is why speculations about a supernatural perfection of perfection before the Fall are alien to the intent of the original narrative. It is the most extreme attempt to separate the origin of evil from the origin of the good. The radical origin of evil is distinct from the primordial origin of the goodness of things. The Adamic myth portends an evolution toward a speculation of a higher degree, in which freedom will be the power of humanity to defect, to undo, and to unmake itself after creation. It narrates the passage from innocence to sin as the status of humanity destined for good and inclined to evil. This drama has already happened. The Adamic myth subordinates to Adam some other figures that decentralize the story. The meaning of the myth resides in its power to evoke speculation on the power of defection contained in freedom. The symbol gives rise to this thought. The myth anticipates such speculation. The Adamic myth is the fruit of the prophetic accusation directed against humanity, for it makes God innocent and accuses humanity. Sin is located at a deeper level then the individual act or transgression. Repentance is not only for actions, but for the root of actions.[14]The way Israel recounted its history was the alternation between threat and promise, a dialectic of judgment and mercy. The ambiguity in humanity, created good and become evil, pervades all the registers of human life. The result is that the human condition is subjected to the rule of hardship. The hardship of being human makes the fallen state of humanity clear. The greatness and the guilt of humanity are mingled. The goodness of humanity is the result of creation in the image of God. the likeness appears as an absence of guilt, and therefore as innocence. I am created in a moment, and I fall in a moment. The event of sin terminates innocence. It is the discontinuity, the breach between my having been created and my becoming evil. The depth of the myth s in its telling of the fall as event, springing up from an unknown source, providing anthropology with the contingency of that radical evil that the penitent is always on the point of calling an evil nature. The myth proclaims the purely historical character of that radical evil. Innocence is older than sin. This one primordial event spreads out among other characters. In particular, the Serpent raises the evil infinite of human desire that animates the movement of civilizations, the appetite for pleasure, for possessions, for power, for knowledge. The restlessness that makes us discontented with the present is our true nature. The myth is the symbolic form of the critique of the illusion of appearance. The serpent is a part of ourselves which we do not recognize. The serpent represents the seduction of us by ourselves, projected into the seductive object. Each of us is tempted by our own lusts (James 1:13-14). The serpent is also outside, for evil is already there, ready to show indifference to the ethical demands of human relationships. And it symbolizes the chaos in me and among us, even though we remain destined for goodness and happiness. Human beings are not absolute evil, and thus, evil has this external quality, and to sin is to yield to its seduction. In the Bible, the Adamic myth is connected to the myth of the Son of man, a Messianic figure destined to end evil. He is the one who is coming, the Human One at the end. A savior establishes a new world. The interest is turned toward the future, toward the second creation, which will surpass the first creation even as it completes it. The eschatological judgment broadens and deepens the meaning of the notion of pardon in justification. Pardon is gracious initiative, movement from transcendence toward immanence. Humanity is acquitted. The symbolism of the judgment says that humanity is pardoned in the collective adventure of the history of salvation. The fulfillment of humanity is linked to a redemption of bodies and to the entire cosmos. The soul cannot be saved without the body, the inner cannot be saved without the outer, the subjective cannot be saved without the totality.
The drama of creation is another mythical type of representation concerning the origin and the end of evil. The divine creative act must struggle with chaos. Salvation is identical with creation, so the act that founds the world is also the liberating act. Ritual re-enactment of the combats at the origin enable participation in that liberating event. This type identifies evil with chaos, salvation with creation.
The tragic vision of existence is a third mythical type of representation concerning the origin and the end of evil. Greek tragedy is the full manifestation of this type. Such a tragic vision of humanity shows that the fault is indistinguishable from the existence of the tragic hero, for he is guilty even though he commits no fault. Salvation consists in an aesthetic deliverance issuing from the tragic spectacle, internalized in the depths of existence and converted into pity with respect to oneself. Yet, the Adamic myth receives a new insight when one looks at it through tragedy. The Adamic figure is tragic. He thematizes a mystery of iniquity that is not reducible to the clear consciousness of an event act. It points to enduring dread. The tragic appears in the enigma of the serpent. The tragic theology that emerges because suffering is not explainable simply by ethical lapses. The book of Job is the supreme example of this enigma. The tragedy of the suffering servant goes beyond Greek tragedy.
The exiled soul is a fourth mythical type of representation concerning the origin and the end of evil. This myth has played a considerable part in western culture because it presided over the growth of Greek philosophy. It divides the human being into soul and body and concentrates on the destiny of the soul. the soul comes from elsewhere and strays here. This myth could merge with the myth of the fall and blend their influences in an indistinct myth.
With these symbols, we can reflect upon the meaning of the theological work crystallized in a concept like original sin.[15] To reflect on its meaning is to deconstruct the concept. The concept will need to be destroyed as a concept to understand its meaning. The reason is that as a concept, original sin is false knowledge, a pseudo-concept. Yet, false knowledge is at the same time true symbol. This process can retrieve the orthodox meaning of original sin, which is nothing less than the concept that evil is the work of freedom. This concept is faithful to the biblical tradition, resisting the enormous pressure that Gnosticism would present to turn evil into substance. Evil is not world. Rather, evil comes from us. The orthodox tradition did this through the story of the Fall. Humanity is the point where evil emerges into the world. Augustine would formulate this view against both the Manichaeans and the Pelagians. Evil is the inclination of what has more being toward what has less being. It is an existential and negatively oriented consent, the opposite of conversion. However, when Augustine took the concept of original toward meaning a guilt of a personal character which juridically merits death and a taint inherited by birth, took it in the direction of indicting humanity for evil and exonerating God. The concept of original sin becomes a quasi-Gnostic concept because it became a rationalized symbol for reason. This train of thought does not differ from the friends of Job, who exonerated God from the evil that had fallen upon Job by presenting the suffering of Job as a just response to his act of sinning. As a rationalized symbol, original sin refers to analogous concepts that have their excess of meaning. It refers to the confession of sin.
The symbol of the fall is irreplaceable because it makes it possible to combine the voluntary character of evil with its quasi-nature, which consists in the fact that evil is already there before we produce it. In the teaching of the church the failure to attend to the symbolic character of the biblical story of the fall has led to a monstrous combination of a juridical concept of imputation for evil to be voluntary, and a biological concept of inheritance for it to be involuntary, acquired, and contracted. [16]
The penitential experience of which original sin is the rational symbol has three traits. First, the realism of sin, for sin is my true situation before God, my wandering course of being. Second, the sinful condition of the individual has a communal dimension. The collective confession of sin expresses a trans-biological and trans-historical solidarity of sin that constitutes the metaphysical unity of humanity. Third, sin is a power that binds humanity and holds humanity captive, reflecting human impotence, and therefore the misery of the human condition.
Thus, the story of the Fall has symbolic power because it condenses in an archetype of humanity everything that the believer experiences in a fugitive fashion and confesses in an allusive way. It universalizes the tragic experience of exile that Israel passed through historically and gave it universal application. The myth has a power to reveal the human condition. Something is discovered that would have remained covered and concealed. In this case, in the story of the Fall, each of us discovers evil, finds it already there in us, outside us, and before us. Christianity has harmed itself by a literal and historicist interpretation of the Adamic myth, plunging Christianity into an absurd history and into pseudo-rational speculations on the quasi-biological transmission of a quasi-juridical guilt for the fault of an early ancestor.
This course of philosophic reasoning has the character of a wager. It presumes that the participant will gain a better understanding of humanity and of creation if I follow the indication of symbolic thought. The intelligibility of the interpretation will verify the wager through coherent discourse. The symbols of deviation, wandering, and captivity, of chaos, mixture, and fall, all of which lead to the servile will under the guidance of a mythology of evil existence, then we have deduced the symbolism of human evil. The task of the philosopher guided by symbols would be to end the prerogative of self-reflection. The symbol gives reason to think that the “I think” is within being, so the being that posits itself in the “I think” has still to discover that the very act by which it abstracts itself from the whole does not cease to share in the being that challenges it in every symbol. The symbols of guilt found in deviation, wandering, and captivity, as well as the myths of chaos, blinding, mixture, and fall, speak to the situation of the being of humanity in the being of the world. The philosophical task is to start from the symbols and elaborate structures of human existence. The symbols are elevated to existential concepts.
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