真理的两种法国变体：利科的“认同”与福柯的“偏激”.pdf

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1、Full Terms&Conditions of access and use can be found athttp:/ by:University of Toronto LibrariesDate:21 March 2016,At:18:18Journal of the British Society for PhenomenologyISSN:0007-1773(Print)2332-0486(Online)Journal homepage:http:/ French Variations on Truth:RicoeursAttestation and Foucaults“Parrhe

2、siastic”AttitudePol VandeveldeTo cite this article:Pol Vandevelde(2015)Two French Variations on Truth:RicoeursAttestation and Foucaults“Parrhesiastic”Attitude,Journal of the British Society forPhenomenology,46:1,33-47,DOI:10.1080/00071773.2014.969966To link to this article:http:/dx.doi.org/10.1080/0

3、0071773.2014.969966Published online:27 Mar 2015.Submit your article to this journal Article views:48View related articles View Crossmark dataTwo French Variations on Truth:Ricoeurs Attestation and Foucaults“Parrhesiastic”AttitudePol Vandevelde*Department of Philosophy,Marquette University,Coughlin H

4、all,PO Box 1881,Milwaukee,WI 53201-1881Both Ricoeur and Foucault,apparently independently of each other,dedicated much effort toprovide an account of truth that goes far beyond the truth of sentences,propositions,orjudgments.While well aware of the speech act theory and pragmatics,they want to gobey

5、ond a formalism of rules of speech or arguments and integrate the attitude of the onewho speaks in the very notion of truth.They see truth not merely as a property ofstatements,but as an existential process in such a way that the truth of statements is linkedto the historically situated speaker.Trut

6、h as a property of statements is related to truth as anevent.However,both reject any form of historicism or relativism.I examine Ricoeurs notion of attestation and Foucaults notion of parrhesia,showing howboth notions represent a kind of“poetics of truth”,which combines the existential position ofth

7、e speaker and the historical circumstances of utterance.I show the extent to which bothpoetics of truth are political and ethical and how successful each poetics is:Ricoeur believesthat he can maintain a claim to universality whereas Foucault abandons such a claim andinstead subscribes to a radical

8、singularity of the event of speech in a mode of truth that is,as he says,“polemic”.There is some irony in treating Ricoeur and Foucault together as operating in a common enter-prise.The irony is not so much due to the fact that they were at one time in competition for repla-cing Jean Hyppolite at th

9、e Collge de France,Foucault obtaining the position and Ricoeur goingto the University of Louvain,where he taught for several years.Rather,the irony is that Ricoeurrepresents hermeneutics in all its forms,endeavours,and achievements whereas Foucault fromthe start rejected it in both its method and am

10、bition claiming that his“archaeology”offered amore rigorous and fruitful method.However,in his last lectures at the Collge de France,Foucaultseems to have a change of heart and uses the expression of“hermeneutics of the subject”to nameexplicitly one of his lecture courses of 198283 and implicitly hi

11、s own enterprise of re-examiningthe question of the subject in ancient Greek and Roman thought during the Hellenistic period andearly Christianity.In what follows,I do not intend to pursue historical considerations about influences betweenthem or claim that Ricoeur explicitly reformulated Foucaults

12、views.Rather,I intend to show whyboth Ricoeur and Foucault believe that the truth of what is said cannot be confined to the meaningcontent or the propositional content or the judgments expressed in what is said.Theircommon goal is to broaden the concept of truth so as to include the attitude of the

13、one who 2015 The British Society for Phenomenology*Email:pol.vandeveldemarquette.eduThe Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology,2015Vol.46,No.1,3347,http:/dx.doi.org/10.1080/00071773.2014.969966Downloaded by University of Toronto Libraries at 18:18 21 March 2016 speaks1and thus treat the tr

14、uth as a historically situated phenomenon or an event.Fully aware ofthe speech act theory and pragmatics,both attempt to offer an alternative understanding of per-formance,one that is existential and historical.They belong in this respect to the trend of contem-porary French philosophers who,under t

15、he influence of Heidegger,have emphasized the notionof“event”(Marion,Romano,Badiou).Ricoeur and Foucault articulate the epistemological andontological consequences of such a view of truth as event.One of my motivations in comparing Ricoeur and Foucault on the side of their commonality isthat neither

16、 of them equates historical situatedness with dependence on the historical situation orunderstands the relatedness of truth to circumstances of utterance as a form of relativization.Another of my motivations on the side of their difference is that,among those who emphasizethe event,Ricoeur and Fouca

17、ult are at the opposite end of the spectrum of possible positions.Ricoeur wants to maintain a claim to universality whereas Foucault abandons it in favour of aradical singularity of the event of speech.Of their views I will only focus on two central notions:attestation(Ricoeur)and parrhesia(Foucault

18、),which are rather similar in appearance.These two notions articulate a view of thetruth as spoken or written and thus related to the historical circumstances of utterance and tothe existential position of the speaker.For both Ricoeur and Foucault we can speak of a“poetics of truth”in the sense that

19、 the truth is,in some way to be specified,“produced”.Thispoetics of truth takes the form of a configuration in Ricoeur and a drama in Foucault,whospeaks of a“dramatic of discourse”.I will show that,because it is a poetics of truth,thusarising out of concrete existential and historical circumstances,

20、there are political and ethical com-ponents to it that coalesce in a different balance.I.Ricoeur:Speaking as ConfigurationIn my discussion of Ricoeur I limit my topic to the specific act of speaking that is related to thepast and about the past the historical narratives and focus exclusively on the

21、status of the nar-rative itself,leaving out of consideration the issues of history and memory.A historical narrativeis obviously about a past event,but,remarkably,it has to configure such an event so that it can berecounted.This poses an interesting problem of reference to the extent that the refere

22、nt the pastevent is not available as such but only through accounts about it,such accounts having to be areconstruction on the basis of documents,testimonies,and evidence of different sorts.The testthat Ricoeur uses is a formulation by Leopold Ranke:to recount events“as they really eigentlichhappene

23、d”,which Ricoeur discusses in the third volume of Time and Narrative as well as inMemory,History,Forgetting.2Unwittingly,Ranke expresses what Ricoeur calls the“enigma”3of historical representation and implicitly acknowledges as insufficient two nave options:first,a simple adequacy between what took

24、place and the historical narrative about it and,second,asimple heterogeneity between them so that historical narratives would be mere“possible1Both Foucault and Ricoeur have provided detailed accounts of what they see as the shortcomings of thespeech act theory and the pragmatics of discourse.Foucau

25、lt addresses these questions in Archaeology ofKnowledge,in which he appeals to a notion of“statement”that is neither the sentence nor the proposition,but the historically situated event of utterance.Ricoeur deals with this issue in his many examinations ofaction(in From Text to Action),of time(Time

26、and Narrative),selfhood(Oneself as Another),and thepast(Memory,History,Forgetting).2La mmoire,lhistoire,loubli.Paris:Editions du Seuil,Collection Points,2000,363;Memory,History,Forgetting,trans.Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer.Chicago:The University Press of Chicago,2004,278.3La mmoire,lhistoire,l

27、oubli,366;Memory,History,Forgetting,279.34P.VandeveldeDownloaded by University of Toronto Libraries at 18:18 21 March 2016 versions”of what took place.Against the first option,there is an obvious difference between thephysics at the level of actions and events and the semantics at the level of words

28、 in narratives.Actions and events are not made of words or narratives and there is no direct route from narrativesto events even if the former attempt to re-enact the past.Against the second option,there is anobvious sameness between the actions and events,on one side,and the narratives recountingth

29、em,on the other:historians and other chroniclers of the past claim that what is recounted intheir respective narratives is“the same”as that which actually took place.Instead of a radicalsimilarity or a radical heterogeneity between what took place and the historical narrative,Rankes combination of t

30、he words“as”and“actually”offers a variation on what Ricoeur callsthe three genres of“Difference”,“Sameness”,and“Analogy”.Because we have sameness to recount what actually happened we cannot simply say that aloss occurs when past events are recounted as if they had an internal meaning when occurring,

31、which would be missed in part by the re-telling.Because we have difference the recountingis not the event we cannot simply say that a continuity exists between the events that tookplace and the retelling that followed them.The genre of analogy,thus,has the task of maintainingboth sameness and differ

32、ence without relying on loss or continuity.It is the analogy at work in thenarrative itself the“such as”in Rankes expression that is supposed to preserve the samenessof the physics of actions and events,but in another genre(speaking and writing)and another reg-ister(rendering the meaning of what too

33、k place).While the goal is to say what actually happened,the criterion of the truth cannot be in the events themselves,which cannot speak by themselves.They have to be established through documents and proofs,have to be understood and explained,and have to be presented in a narrative.These are the t

34、hree phases of historical investigation:adocumentary phase,an understanding/explanation phase,and a representing phase.The third phase is the one that needs scrutiny.Ricoeur calls it reprsentance(representing,representation)or lieutenance(standing-in),where“representing reprsentance.means.the reduct

35、ion to the same,the recognition of alterity,and the analogizing apprehension”.4Ricoeur understands this reprsentance as the translation of the German Vertretung(a notionhe borrows from Karl Heussi)to name this fact that historical narratives render the past“suchas it really happened”.On the one hand

36、,“things must have happened as they are told in thepresent narrative”,5but,on the other,“the really is only signified by the such as”.6Thus,we have the facts such“as”they“really”took place.The“representing”(reprsentance)consistsin offering an equivalent of what took place,but by the same token,Ricoe

37、ur says,adduces an“increase of being”or an“increase of sense”or an“increase of meaning surcrot dtre,surcrotde sens,augmentation de signification”.7Ricoeur tries three models to secure the“such as it was”or the analogical transfer in orderto fasten the analogy with the difference and the sameness.The

38、se three models are:mimesis(a narrative of action is a rendering of the narrative-like features of action),debt(theguarantee that the narrative is about the events that took place lies in the attitude of the onewho recounts and who feels“in debt”towards the events of the past or the agents of pastac

39、tions),and,lastly,attestation(the one who recounts the narrative attests to the truth ofwhat is said by recounting it and to his character as truth-teller).I will focus here on thethird one,attestation.4Temps et rcit 3 Le temps racont.Paris:Les Editions du Seuil,Collection Points,1985,285;Time andNa

40、rrative vol 3,trans.Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer.Chicago:University of Chicago Press,1988,157.Translation modified.5Temps et rcit 3,279.Ricoeurs emphasis;Time and Narrative vol 3,154.Translation modified.6Temps et rcit 3,280;Time and Narrative vol 3,155.7La mmoire,lhistoire,loubli,369;Memory,H

41、istory,Forgetting,567.The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology35Downloaded by University of Toronto Libraries at 18:18 21 March 2016 Ricoeur introduces the notion of attestation in its technical sense in Oneself as Another andeven considers that it is the“password”(le“mot de passe”)of th

42、e whole book.8In an essaytitled“Lattestation:entre phnomnologie et ontologie”,9he describes attestation as a“non-doxic”assurance in the sense that attestation is not manifested in the mode of a“believingthat”,but in the mode of“believing in”:“The witness believes what he says and we believe inhis si

43、ncerity”.10Attestation redoubles the truth of the statement and is,as such,a commitmentthat produces truth.Applied to the self,attestation is the sort of confidence or assurance(nondoxic epistemological status)that each of us hasof existing(ontological status)on the mode of self(phenomenological sta

44、tus).11In Memory,History,Forgetting,Ricoeur expands the role of attestation beyond the issue ofselfhood and applies it to narratives about the past.It is still about attesting oneself,but in relationto what one says when presenting an account of events,for example.Providing a narrative,as inthe case

45、 of historians,is seen as an action that is imputed to the speaker or writer.What I expect from my close relations is that they approve of what I attest:that I am able to speak,act,recount,impute to myself the responsibility for my actions.12More specifically,when applied to historical narratives,at

46、testation functions as what holdstogether the three phases of the historical reconstruction:the proof of the document,the analysisleading to intelligibility,and the writing of a narrative.The reason why we need attestation to holdthe three components together is that the past is not powerful enough

47、to impose itself on narrativesand constrain them in such a narrow fashion that only“one”narrative or rendering would becorrect.Ricoeur writes:“It is possible to compose several plots about the same incidents(which thus do not deserve any more to be called the same events)”.13The sentence in parenthe

48、sesis the key.What then does an“event”consist of if several accounts can be given of it and if thesedifferent accounts can claim to be about“the same”event?What in an event can represent a resist-ance,or what Sartre calls the coefficient of adversity for the multiple narratives that can representit?

49、Put differently,if several different narratives can claim to be about the“same”event,forexample President Jacksons actions at the origin of the Cherokees“trail of tears”,we havetwo options.In the first option,something in the event itself gives itself in possibly differentmanners and this explains w

50、hy we have several and often differing accounts of President Jack-sons actions.In the second option,“events”do not have a stable“essence”.They can becarved out in different ways out of the same mass of movements,gestures,and words andreconfigured in opposite fashion;or they can even remain nonconfig