The Good of Recognition: Phenomenology, Ethics, and Religion in the Thought of Levinas and Ricoeur

By Michael Sohn

The Good of Recognition analyzes the polysemy of recognition operative in the thought of two contemporary French thinkers, Emmanuel Lévinas (1906–1995) and Paul Ricœur (1913–2005). Author Michael Sohn shows that recognition—a concept most often associated with Hegel’s works—appears prominently throughout the works of Lévinas and Ricœur, which exist at the intersection of phenomenology, ethics, politics, and religion. Sohn situates recognition in the sociopolitical context of Lévinas and Ricœur and excavates the philosophical and religious sources that undergird the two thinkers’ use of recognition before contextualizing recognition within the broader themes of their thought.

By reflecting on phenomenology, ethics, and religion in The Good of Recognition, Sohn not only shows how Lévinas and Ricœur articulated a response to the pervasive problems of nonrecognition and misrecognition in their day but also suggests how their thought can contribute to a better understanding of our contemporary social and political landscape.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Release date: Dec 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781481303705

Book preview

PREFACE

This work analyzes the polysemy of the concept of recognition operative in the thought of two contemporary French thinkers, Emmanuel Lévinas (1906–1995) and Paul Ricœur (1913–2005). Recognition is most often associated with the works of G. W. F. Hegel, not Lévinas or Ricœur. While many scholars acknowledge that these two philosophers are indebted to and critical of Hegelianism, there is no sustained study regarding their treatment of the Hegelian concept of recognition (Anerkennung). This volume shows that recognition appears prominently throughout their works and argues that it plays an important role in their thought at the intersection of phenomenology, ethics, politics, and religion. Part of the purpose of this project, then, is to bring to light the importance of recognition for Lévinas and Ricœur by situating their thought within the sociopolitical context of their day, excavating the philosophical and religious sources that undergird their use of the concept, and contextualizing that understanding within the broader themes of their thought.

This work employs not only a historical approach, however, but also a constructive approach: it is interested in more than simply situating Lévinas’ and Ricœur’s thought and subjecting it to critical analyses. It also puts their insights into critical conversation with contemporary social and political theory. By thinking with and through Lévinas and Ricœur, the phenomenological, ethical, and religious dimensions of recognition, which are all too absent in political and social theory, are explored. In contemporary political theory, the concept of recognition is at the center of debates over multiculturalism and identity politics—whether political demands for recognition by ethnocultural groups is amenable to modern liberal democratic principles.¹ Bracketing the issue of what cultural or group identity means, there is little discussion of the meaning of recognition itself and why a group desires it in the first place.² No one has done more to decode the logic or moral grammar underlying struggles for recognition than German social theorist Axel Honneth.³ He emphasizes, however, the various spheres where recognition takes place for the purposes of structuring and emancipating social and institutional life to the extent that he overlooks the phenomenon of recognition in its multiple modes in everyday life. If contemporary political theory on recognition is driven to a socially differentiated account of the moral grammar of struggles for recognition, then contemporary social theory is driven to a phenomenologically differentiated account of the distinct modalities and attitudes of recognition. Whatever discussions exist in political and social theory on the issue of recognition require a clarification of its meaning, and it is this more basic fundamental task that is the broader constructive purpose of the project. Through a critical comparison of the thought of Lévinas and Ricœur, a concept of recognition is developed for the purposes of clarifying its importance for a conception of good in ethics and for providing an adequate basis and grounding for politics.

The historical and constructive task is pursued as follows. Chapter 1 situates Lévinas’ and Ricœur’s reflections on recognition within both the sociopolitical and intellectual contexts of their day. They offered a philosophical response to the forces of anonymity and estrangement within modern mass society as well as vicious forms of identification based on ethnic, racial, and religious categories articulated amid the resurrection of Hegel studies and the emergence of existentialism and phenomenology in France in the 1930s and 1940s. The confluence of these major philosophical movements is the historical context to properly understand Lévinas’ and Ricœur’s distinct ethical and political appropriation of Hegel’s concept of Anerkennung. The chapter also situates their ethics and politics of recognition within a theological context where both thinkers witnessed the failures of modern liberal theology and sought to revive and rearticulate their religious traditions—Judaism and Christianity, respectively—in the aftermath of the Second World War. Unlike many of their contemporaries, Lévinas and Ricœur argue for the continued relevance of religion for modern life, and that relevance is evident in the distinct contribution that religion makes to their ethics and politics of recognition.

Chapters 2 and 3 proceed to detail and reconstruct the precise nature and understanding of Lévinas’ concept of recognition by considering in turn his philosophical and Jewish writings. While Lévinas endeavors to distinguish philosophy and Judaism, even sending his writings to different publishing companies, his concerns often parallel and intersect with each other. Theological concepts and biblical references can frequently be uncovered in his philosophical writings, and likewise philosophical concepts and references are often found in his Jewish writings. Perhaps nowhere is this dialectic of separation and relation more clearly evident than in his account of recognition. Chapter 2 follows his critique of narrow epistemological accounts of cognition presupposed in naturalism, which was the dominant method for the human and natural sciences (Geistes- and Naturwissenschaften) up until the twentieth century. It also considers his critique of phenomenology, which is Edmund Husserl’s alternative proposal for a rigorous scientific method. Lévinas’ distinct concept of recognition can be seen as an attempt to pursue more faithfully what Husserl had initiated—a rigorous science that accesses our most concrete existence. What he uncovers are relations to others not as mere objects of knowledge but as persons worthy of ethical recognition. In a parallel fashion, chapter 3 follows his critique of narrow epistemological accounts of cognition at the basis of modern historical sciences of Judaism, especially in the movement of Wissenschaft des Judentums. Lévinas’ concept of recognition, then, emerges as an attempt to articulate and revive Jewish identity for a postwar period by retrieving classical sources that modern Judaism had neglected while enlarging its relevance beyond a historical community by employing a general phenomenology. He thereby draws from the textual sources and traditions of Judaism to reinterpret certain key Jewish doctrines within the horizon of the new science of phenomenology, but he also reinterprets the phenomenon of recognition in specifically Jewish terms. These chapters, then, form a pair as they both focus on Lévinas’ concept of recognition at the intersection of his phenomenology, ethics, and religion.

Chapters 4 and 5 detail and reconstruct the precise nature and understanding of Ricœur’s concept of recognition by considering in turn his philosophical and Christian writings. While Ricœur, like Lévinas, sought to separate his philosophical writings from his theological writings, certain concepts and methods often parallel and intersect with each other. Chapter 4 traces and analyzes his concept of recognition from his early works in existential phenomenology through his later ethical and political reflections. Chapter 5 engages in the constructive task of relating his writings on Christian theology, evinced in Gerhard Ebeling’s notion of the process of the Word, to the church’s role in institutionalizing the phenomenological, ethical, and political dimensions of recognition. His reflections on the nature and task of theology, in my judgment, present a complex and sophisticated approach that retrieves a post-Enlightenment appreciation of the Christian tradition, on the one hand, and yet insists on the ongoing creative appropriation and interpretation of Christian symbols, narratives, and texts for the purposes of personal, moral, social, and institutional transformation, on the other.

The sixth and final chapter concludes with some reflections on phenomenology, ethics, and religion for the purpose of putting Lévinas’ and Ricœur’s insights on recognition in critical conversation with contemporary social and political theory. The primordial concrete existential-phenomenological dimension of recognition, a parsing out of the multiple ethical modalities of recognition, and the distinct contribution that religion can make to an ethics and politics of recognition are all absent in current debates within social and political theory. By concluding with reflections in phenomenology, ethics, and religion as they relate to the good of recognition, this work not only shows how Lévinas and Ricœur articulated a response to the pervasive problems of nonrecognition and misrecognition in their day but it also suggests how their thought can contribute to a better understanding of our contemporary situation.

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¹The literature that is critical of multicultural policies is extensive. See, for instance, Jeremy Waldron, Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative, in The Rights of Minority Cultures, ed. Will Kymlicka (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 93–119; and David Miller, Group Identities, National Identities and Democratic Politics, in Citizenship and National Identity (Oxford: Polity Press, 2000), 62–80. The literature that defends multiculturalism is equally extensive. Defenders within the liberal tradition argue for group rights as constitutive of individual rights. See Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989). Defenders from a more communitarian liberal perspective emphasize group rights, where group identity is not simply the aggregate of its individual members but rather has a distinct existence and identity with its own right to self-preservation. See Avishai Margalit and Moshe Halbertal, Liberalism and the Right to Culture, Social Research 61, no. 3 (1994): 491–510; and Charles Taylor, The Politics of Recognition, in Multiculturalism and The Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 40–41n16.

²Charles Taylor’s essay The Politics of Recognition catalyzed this interest in the concept within political theory. But, as Heikki Ikäheimo succinctly puts it, "Interestingly, Taylor’s ‘The Politics of Recognition’ has been an important and influential contribution, even though it is far from self-evident what exactly it is about. See Heikki Ikäheimo, Taylor on Something Called ‘Recognition,’ " in Perspectives on the Philosophy of Charles Taylor, ed. Arto Laitinen and Nicholas H. Smith, vol. 71 of Acta philosophica fennica (Helsinki: Societas Philosophica Fennica, 2002), 108.

³Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflict, trans. Joel Anderson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995).

CHAPTER ONE

SITUATING THE CONCEPT OF RECOGNITION

Emmanuel Lévinas and Paul Ricœur belonged to a generation that experienced acute feelings of both nonrecognition and misrecognition. They perceptively detected the tragic irony that as technological progress in modern society brought people closer together, it left them more distant and remote from each other.¹ Yet, even as they decried the malaise of anonymity that afflicted isolated individuals in modern mass society, they also witnessed and experienced invidious forms of social discrimination and political persecution. The Dreyfus affair that scandalized French society at the turn of the century remained part of their generation’s cultural collective memory, and Lévinas and Ricœur themselves were both confined in prisoner of war camps in Nazi-occupied France. They articulated a response to these social and political forces by drawing from the intellectual sources available to them. Their thought and works, particularly on recognition, can only be properly understood by situating them within the philosophical and theological context of the day. The concept of recognition, which was scarcely noted in French philosophy, only emerged in the 1930s and 1940s with the resurrection of Hegel studies. And Lévinas’ and Ricœur’s distinct appropriations of the Hegelian term Anerkennung could only take the form that they did with the emergence of existentialism and phenomenology. The confluence of these two major philosophical trends in French thought is the sine qua non for their use and understanding of recognition.

During the same period in which France enjoyed these developments in philosophy, important movements in theology emerged. Thinkers such as Edmond Fleg, Robert Gamzon, and Marc Cohn sought a Jewish cultural renaissance that returned to concrete religious life by retrieving the classical texts and sources of Judaism. Lévinas’ work as director of l’École Normale Israélite Orientale (ENIO)—an organization dedicated to training teachers to preserve and cultivate Jewish identity through the study of Talmudic texts in the Mediterranean basin—attests to his own commitment to this movement.² Ricœur, too, belonged to a generation in French Protestant thought, initiated by the work of Pierre Maury and W. A. Visser ’t Hooft and pursued by people like Roger Mehl, characterized by disenchantment with modern liberal theology, which sought to renew Christian faith and existence. The overarching intellectual context will be outlined to properly situate and understand Lévinas’ and Ricœur’s thought.

Philosophical Sources

The French Reception of Hegel:

The Emergence of Recognition as an Issue

The question of recognition emerged as an issue out of a broader social and political context of a generation experiencing acute feelings of anonymity and witnessing invidious forms of identification and discrimination. Lévinas and Ricœur found resources for formulating a philosophical response to these historical forces within Hegelian thought or, more precisely, in Hegelian thought as it was received by French intellectuals in the 1930s and 1940s. The purpose of this section is to account for the emergence of Hegelianism in general and the Hegelian concept of recognition in particular as an issue within France, which in turn made it possible for Lévinas and Ricœur to creatively appropriate it as an issue central to their thought. For Hegelianism in general was not always viewed favorably in France, and the concept of recognition in particular, Hegel scholars today concede, is less prominent in his later thought and has an important but relatively small role, in his early works.³ It should be noted that although this generation of thinkers belonged to the same geographical locale and historical period, there are important differences between them. Those differences notwithstanding, the points of commonality, in broad terms, will set the scene and situate the main thinkers and their arguments.

Alexandre Koyré reported in 1930 that the state of Hegel studies in France was relatively meager and poor, compared to Germany, England, and Italy.⁴ The latter half of the nineteenth century and early part of the twentieth century witnessed a reaction against Hegelianism, ranging from indifference to outright hostility. Perceived as applying an absurd dialectic for the aims of abstract theory, Hegel was so thoroughly dismissed that Léon Brunschvicg, a major proponent of neo-Kantianism—the dominant philosophical school at the time—proclaimed that the verdict of history was that Hegelianism had suffered the worst disgrace.⁵ This state of affairs, however, began to change during the 1930s. The positive revival of Hegelian studies is located for some in Jean Wahl’s Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel (1929)⁶ or Koyré’s translations and commentaries on Hegel’s early texts.⁷ Others attribute this revival to Alexandre Kojève’s famous seminars on Hegel at l’École pratique des hautes études from 1933 to 1939,⁸ attended by students who would become the seminal thinkers in the next generation of French thought.⁹ It is clear, in any case, that the dominance of neo-Kantianism began to wane and Hegelianism was on its ascendency in France.

The revival of Hegel studies signified not a wholesale appreciation of his thought but a certain interpretation of Hegel, one that turned not to his logic or his system but rather to his phenomenology or consciousness—that is, the human elements within his thought found especially in his earlier works. Without denying its idealist impulses and logical structures, Jean Wahl, for instance, discovered the concreteness of experience and history in Hegel’s thought. According to Wahl, the philosophy of Hegel, particularly in his early works, is not reducible to logical formulas and theoretical issues; rather, it is fundamentally grounded in practical concerns. His interpretation of Hegel finds an existential dimension highlighted in the figure of unhappy consciousness and traces through motifs of division, sin, and torment, which indicate that human development is a product of alienation and reconciliation. For Wahl, the Hegelian dialectic, before being a method, is the experience of a divided consciousness striving for unity. During that same period, Alexandre Koyré discovered a humanized Hegel while translating his early works from Frankfurt and Jena. Koyré retrieves Hegel’s early thought to argue that, at its most profound level, it is concerned with the essential structures of the human spirit.¹⁰ Reversing the priority of logic over human existence, for Koyré, Hegel’s system is fundamentally grounded in anthropology. Perhaps most well known are Alexandre Kojève’s lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology, which present a stunning and dramatic interpretation that made the master-slave relationship and the theme of recognition the centerpiece of Hegel’s thought. Kojève’s account clearly focuses on Hegel’s Phenomenology in isolation from the rest of his corpus. Moreover, his concept of recognition narrowly centers on the master-slave dialectic and the oppositional struggle therein rather than the final mode of mutual recognition. In other words, Kojève sees the struggle for recognition as the final, not the transitional, configuration of intersubjectivity. Whatever distortions or narrow interpretations that Kojève may have introduced, his thought would be influential for the French reception of Hegel, leading one commentator on contemporary French philosophy to observe that, since Kojève, the Master-Slave relationship has been a constant in French thought.¹¹

By 1950 the appreciative reception of Hegel was so complete that Koyré, who had only two decades prior reported the relative meagerness and impoverishment of Hegel studies, could now declare:

Since the publication of this report [1930], the situation of Hegel in the world of European philosophy and in particular French philosophy, has changed entirely: Hegelian philosophy has witnessed a veritable renaissance, or better, a resurrection.¹²

Wahl’s monumental Le malheur de la conscience, Koyré’s translations and readings of Hegel’s Jena years, Kojève’s lectures on the Phenomenology, and Jean Hyppolite’s masterful translation of and commentary on the Phenomenology all contributed to the resurrection of Hegel’s thought in France. To be sure, their interpretations of Hegel had significant differences among them, focusing on one or another aspect of his thought, whether it was the figure of unhappy consciousness for Wahl, the dramatic figure of the master-slave dialectic for Kojève, or the concept of time for Koyré. Despite these differences, it is important to note that, in their retrieval of Hegel, it is the earlier works—his early theological writings, his tentative formulations at Frankfurt and Jena, and finally his Phenomenology—that are studied. From these texts, Hegel’s philosophy reemerged in a way that, without denying his absolute idealism, nevertheless turned towards the concrete, to borrow a term employed by Wahl.¹³ This turn to the concrete in the reinterpretation and retrieval of Hegel’s thought marked a shift that enabled the term recognition, which had played a relatively minor role within Hegel’s works and his French reception, to emerge as a central concept.

The French Appropriation of Recognition through Existentialism and Phenomenology

Emmanuel Lévinas and Paul Ricœur received their formative education amid this movement to renew and resurrect Hegel studies in France, and indeed their early intellectual biographies intersect with these towering figures in French thought. Lévinas’ first published work, a French translation of Edmund Husserl’s Cartesianische Meditationes, was overseen by Koyré.¹⁴ He attended Kojève’s seminars on Hegel and met with him personally throughout the 1930s.¹⁵ For Lévinas, however, it was Jean Wahl, under whom he would pursue his doctoral studies at the Sorbonne and to whom he would later dedicate his groundbreaking work, Totalité et infini, who would exert the most influence with respect to his understanding of Hegel. Lévinas credits the renewal of Hegel studies in France with Wahl’s publication of Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel in 1930: The commentary reveals concrete experiences behind the rigorous formalism of Hegel’s system. The mature Hegel no longer seems to have forgotten the anxieties of his youth.¹⁶

Lévinas was not interested in expositing Hegel’s work per se but rather sought to appropriate his thought in light of contemporary philosophical trends, particularly with the emergence of Husserlian phenomenology. When Lévinas migrated to France to pursue his education at Strasbourg in 1923, the university was uniquely positioned by virtue of its proximity to Germany and German culture to transmit the emerging developments in existentialism and phenomenology. Only four years prior, it had been called in fact Kaiser-Wilhelms-Universität and was only renamed the Université de Strasbourg with the cession of Alsace-Lorraine back to France in the aftermath of the First World War.¹⁷ It was particularly fortuitous, then, that Lévinas studied there at a time when Husserlian phenomenology was just beginning to emerge in France. In 1927 Lévinas first encountered Husserl’s ideas on the recommendation of his friend Gabrielle Peiffer. Jean Hering, a professor in the Faculty of Protestant Theology and a member of Husserl’s original circle of disciples at Göttingen, later introduced him to the master himself.¹⁸ On Hering’s recommendation, Lévinas proceeded to attend Husserl’s seminars at Freiburg in the summer of 1928 and winter of 1929 on phenomenological psychology and the constitution of intersubjectivity. Together, Peiffer and Lévinas would translate Husserl’s Cartesianische Meditationen—lectures he gave