its waters are ever-flowing;

Do not grieve,

drink your fill!

Don’t think it will ever run dry--

This is the endless Ocean!

-Rumi

Perhaps the fundamental question in philosophy since the turn towards the subject in René Descartes is that of clarifying the limits of human knowledge. The most systematic attempt to articulate the structures and limits of the human mind was undertaken by Immanuel Kant in his ‘Critique of Pure Reason’. Kant argued for an understanding of subjectivity defined by finitude, setting strict limits on what humans could know through an analysis of the A Priori structures of consciousness. While Kant was a philosopher of finitude, his philosophy gave rise to three of the most systematic attempts to understand the absolute: those of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. The most ambitious of these three, Hegel, laid out a systematic treatment of all reality which attempted to explain truth as a dynamic movement toward absolute knowledge.

To a student of the history of philosophy, the development from strict limitation to absolute knowing seems rather odd, but it highlights how a ‘limit’ functions within philosophical systems. The explicit realization of limitation gives thought the space to push past this limit. After all, the statement that there exists something, whether it be the absolute or the ‘object in itself ’, which is so qualitatively distinct from human cognition as to be untouchable by it, serves as a logical absurdity. What could be meant by the existence of something which could be spoken about but yet is not able to interact at all with cognition? As Todd McGowenn writes, it was Hegel’s brilliance to realize that the quest towards absolute knowledge begins precisely at the Kantian realization of the limitation of human cognition. One cannot know whether something ‘really exists,’ but they do know that one can’t know that. The whole of the Phenomenology is born from this insight.

In Christian theology, the question of epistemic limitation serves as a rather important dividing line between various theological traditions. Christians have a seemingly impossible task, that of both preserving an understanding of God which is absolutely transcendent - which does not reduce God to a being among beings that can be understood like any other object - while also accepting Paul’s rather strong language about knowledge of God - that we shall know as we are known. In Eastern Orthodox metaphysics, the tradition with which I am best versed, several attempts have been made to articulate this distinction. Whether it be the Palamasian distinction between essence and energies, or the Dionysian preservation of the radical singularity of the ‘one’, orthodox vocabulary has struggled to articulate how one can fully know the divine while remaining distinct from it.

Protestant debates in the early 20th century between Paul Tillich, who, following Schelling, so absolutized the transcendence of God as to demythologize the story of Christ and doctrines such as the Trinity, and Karl Barth, who so radicalized human finitude as to strip knowledge of transcendence to biblical revelation, also attempted to articulate a solution to this difficult question. Additionally, Jean-Luc Marion attempted to preserve God's transcendence by situating him ‘beyond being itself’. These three figures (yes, even Barth!) understand God by first beginning with a pre-conceptualized understanding of finitude drawn from Kant.

Given my hesitation to accept Kant’s critical philosophy, I believe that Christians need to draw from philosophical traditions which predate Kant, specifically Neoplatonism and Vedantic metaphysics, to articulate a grammar of the divine. It is Neoplatonism which offers an account of God’s intimate relation to the world, while Vedanta offers a constant reminder of the logical necessity of ‘non-dualism’.

As to the greatest thinker who used Neoplatonism to understand the relation between the infinite and the finite, I find myself rather compelled by Gregory of Nyssa’s concept of Epektasis, or of human beings’ endless movement towards the divine. I believe that the interpretation of Epektasis articulated by Hans Urs von Balthasar in his work on Gregory of Nyssa can solve the paradoxical question of knowledge of transcendence. By drawing from Neoplatonic resources, Gregory of Nyssa did not fall prey to the temptation to understand God in terms of pre-established human finitude. Rather, Gregory maintained both an understanding of finitude as already always permeated by the divine and infinity as already containing within itself the finite. This meant that God and the world were not two opposed ‘things’ which have an ‘infinite qualitative distinction ’ to use Barth’s Kierkegaardian phrase. Rather, the world is an expression of God, which participates in his infinite being. This means that Gregory can say that God is ‘Being’ which infinitely transcends ‘beings’ while being intimately pressent to them

The ‘limit on epistemology’ which makes God ultimately unknowable to humans serves not as a static boundary which locks the creature out of true communion with God. Rather, finitude should be understood as diastema, a dynamic life process of constant movement towards the divine. Finitude is not a tragic reality which must be overcome, but is the precondition which allows the created to participate in the uncreated. True knowledge is therefore not ‘grasping’ or ‘not-grasping’ God, but the collapse of these two states into ‘ungrasping’, an entering into the ‘divine darkness’ of faith and movement towards the divine.

To use Gregory’s image of Moses, when Moses went up to God, he wished to look God face-to-face. However, to look God face-to-face is to be opposed to him, so Moses had to follow behind God, to embark on the constant journey towards the inner sanctuary of God’s ever-bountiful essence. There is no room in Gregory’s picture for a static, final collapse where cognition realizes its limit and stops short before true communion with God (which, strangely, is exactly what the Hegelian project ended up doing by collapsing the infinite and finite into pure negation). Rather, it is precisely the nature of the finite to exceed past existing boundaries of limitation to fuller expressions of the divine. As was Freud’s insight, that humans really desire for desire, Gregory realizes that it is only in infinite movement towards God that the human person could ever be satisfied.

But isn’t this infinite stretching out towards the divine still a somewhat unsatisfactory state? How can it be said that we ‘know God as we are known’ when there always remain parts of God which are unknown? Where is room for true Theosis? Here is precisely where having a correct understanding of Trinitarian metaphysics is important. For, as Bulgakov articulated in ‘The Comforter’, the very dynamic of the inter-trinitarian life is that the Father, the logically prior ‘begetter’ of the Son and Holy Spirit, always remains somewhat ‘unexpressed’ even while being fully expressed in the Son. This Trinitarian metaphysics doesn’t reduce the Trinity to a series of logical relations but rather allows for a picture of the absolute as alive and in constant movement even while being fully self-sufficient and impassible. This analysis of the Trinity, however, sounds strikingly similar to the analysis of subjectivity and the soul’s ascent towards God (besides, of course, that the soul is only ever complete by being in relation to God’s infinity).

The finite then comes to its full expression by entering into the inter-trinitarian movement towards fuller and fuller expressions of the ever-flowing divine waters of the Father. And here, the Vedantic, non-dualistic realization that Brahman (absolute undifferentiated reality) and the self (Atman) are really the same thing. ‘Thou art that,’ as the Sama Veda writes of the human self in relation to Brahman. Even though Atman is radically dependent on Brahman, its substance is identical to the substance of Brahman. And this is precisely what is meant by the doctrine of Theosis in Gregory of Nyssa (and his later interpreter, Maximus the Confessor). The ‘Self’ and ‘God's self’ are truly the same reality, although the human self is always logically posterior to God’s self and an ‘image’ of the divine. This is why Maximus was able to use such strong language about deification: that humans would become ‘uncreated’ by participating in the divine life. Or, as Athanasius writes, ‘God became man so that man might become God.’

And so, Epektasis offers perhaps the most profound interpretation of the finite’s relation to the infinite that Christian metaphysics has ever produced. It does this not by simply reducing the two realities to absolute identity as Hegel did (after all, the created always remains radically dependent on the infinite, even while the infinite remains self-sufficient) but by offering a non-dualistic account of the relation between God and the created world.

Slavoj Žižek is perhaps modern philosophy’s most eccentric figure, boasting a huge personality, obscene jokes, and radical philosophical positions. After rising to popularity for offering a unique interpretation of Hegel, which draws from the Freudian and Lacanian Psychoanalytic tradition, Žižek has become somewhat of a minor philosophical celebrity for left-leaning continental philosophers. For Zizek, the absolute should be understood as a ‘non-all’, lacking all substance and only existing as a product of a negative void. This ‘non-all’ is the purely immanent frame, which is riddled with contradiction because it only exists to cover up the traumatic kernel of negativity. Therefore, Zizek reads Hegel as a philosopher who argues that reality is simply the movement from nothing, through nothing, to nothing.

In ‘The Monstrosity of Christ’, Žižek goes head-to-head with John Milbank over Hegel, Modernity, and God. Milbank is an Anglo-Catholic figure known for his engagement with modern continental philosophy and the movement ‘Radical Orthodoxy’, which he helped found. The book itself offers significant dopamine rushes for readers of continental philosophy, as Zizek and Milbank engage with figures as diverse as Eckhart, Badiou, Deleuze, Heidegger, and Chesterton. I have spent the last several months reading and rereading various sections of the debate, and will offer my reactions to it below.

As a Christian, there is always something deeply disturbing about reading a compelling Atheist argument against Christianity, whether it be from Nietzsche in The Antichrist, Feuerbach in The Essence of Christianity, or even (if I must admit) the weaker new wave Atheist thinkers like Harris or Dawkins. Zizek, unsurprisingly given his Lacanian background, offers a nihilistic reading of the Christian faith. He, following Hegel, believes Christianity is the ultimate religion of negativity. This is because the true radical core of Christianity is the crucified Christ, where God is revealed to be internally divided. Zizek often quotes G.K. Chesterton: “On the cross Christ became the world’s first true Atheist”. Zizek argues that during the crucifixion, God really did die and poured himself out onto the material world. The resurrection, then, does not demonstrate the existence of some absolute, transcendent deity who stands above the world, but rather represents the Holy Spirit becoming present in the community of believers. The Holy Spirit isn’t an entity in itself but is purely virtual, meaning it exists only because a subject acts as if it exists. This community of believers is, then, literally the body of Christ, insofar as it is the only place where God exists.

In some sense, this argument is a radical form of absolute idealism, where ‘God’ only exists insofar as human subjects acknowledge that he exists. However, Zizek’s argument, not being simple nihilism, argues that subjects can recognize the contradictory nature of reality; that there is no God, no truth beyond the absolutely imminent. Because subjects alone recognize contradiction, they are radically free and responsible for themselves. This concept of ‘freedom’ is very important for Zizek and serves as the moral core structuring his argument. He believes that for there to be a free subject, the subject must encounter the purely negative and come to grips with themself.

What makes Zizek’s argument unique is that it attempts to use a parallax shift to undermine Christianity’s own internal logic. This means that Zizek wishes to engage Christianity on its own terms to show that the logic of the crucifixion necessitates a ‘death-of-God theology ’. The true development of Christian thought is the eventual realization of the radical core of the crucifixion as it develops from Orthodoxy to Catholicism, to Protestantism, and eventually the ‘death of God’ articulated by thinkers like. J. J. Altizer. In a shocking twist, to be a non-heretical Christian is to give up on God, or as Žižek writes, ‘Only a Christian can be a true Atheist’. It makes sense, then, that Zizek recognizes that his Atheist position is only intelligible in the fallout of Theism (at one point, Zizek points out that the direction the West is currently heading in is back to a pagan ontology, espoused by thinkers like Nietzsche and Derrida).

The true radical core of Zizek’s argument is that it preserves Christianity’s ethical core while sublating it within a Materialist framework. Therefore, Christians apologists (and Milbank himself) cannot launch the traditional polemics against Materialism. Indeed, the onus is strangely shifted onto the Christian as to why they still believe in a transcendent deity as opposed to the simply immanent virtual body of believers. Zizek follows Nietzsche, then, in arguing that strong Christian metaphysics often lead to passive subjects disinterested in the imminent world because they believe in a transcendent ‘beyond’.

To be consistent, Zizek must admit that he, in line with other thinkers of Hegel, does see himself as espousing the absolute culmination of historical development. This is in the sense that the true ‘absolute’ is simply the recognition that the imminent is all that there is, and that subjects must exercise their freedom while navigating the inherently contradictory world. This ‘absolute’ must exist in every position as a latent possibility, for every symbolic structure is unstable by its own logic (this then explains the structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as moving through various contradictions inherent in philosophy until contradiction is revealed as the substance of absolute knowing).

To respond to Zizek, then, Milbank must demonstrate that it is Zizek who is the actual Christian heretic by showing that he has misunderstood Christianity’s internal logic. If it is true that the history of Christianity should not be understood as the eventual realization of a traumatic truth, but rather the progressive revelation of God, then Zizek’s position ceases to be historically necessary. Milbank’s first move must be structurally similar to the Postmodern critique of Modernity (think Derrida, Heidegger, and Foucault) while retaining an Ontology grounded in God.

Therefore, Milbank begins his response to Zizek by claiming that his argument exclusively operates within a specific Liberal Protestant Metanarrative (the Protestant narrative which sees itself as espousing the core of Christian belief in propositional form). This Metanarrative is precisely the same one that produced demythologization theologies such as Bultmann’s and Positivism. That Zizek finds himself staunchly situated in the Germanic Idealist tradition (which drew much from protestantism) explains why the Materialist argument for the death of God is so obvious to Zizek. His parallax shift flows naturally as he moves among various Christian figures - Boehme and Eckhart specifically - articulating that the ultimate culmination of their logic ends with Žižek’s materialist position. As was the case with the movement in Europe from 17th-century Protestant Deism to Atheism (where God progressively becomes abstracted from the world until reality becomes intelligible without him), so does Zizek paint his position as the hidden conclusion of Christian theories of atonement.

As opposed to this metanarrative, Milbank offers an alternative modernity, one which takes the Thomist realist path instead of following Scotus and Ockham into nominalism and the equivalence of Being. This modernity, instead of seeing violence as a necessary step in historical processes, approaches Christian discourse through a radically Augustinian view of sin. This view sees violence, sin, and death as being accidental perversions of the truer reality of being. Therefore, death lacks any ontological status of its own; it is simply a random perversion of the truer story which is revealed in the resurrection of Christ. On the cross, then, death is not made absolute, for God rises again. Rather, death is revealed to be exactly the non-absolute which lacks any substance in itself. This follows the concern as to the nature of God’s relationship to Godself, which was already embedded within Christian discourse in the Patristic period (and is why both Catholic and Orthodox Christians refuse the notion that Christ was rejected by God on the cross).

Viewed in this light, Zizek has inverted the true meaning of Christianity and missed its actual radical core. This core is not that “Christ is the first true atheist” but that Christ is the first sign of the coming of the renewal of the world. The absolute is then not negativity or potency but pure, unbridled actuality. God is then both the purely immanent and the radically transcendent, or to use Augustine’s wonderful phrase, ‘interior intimo meo’.

To adopt these Augustinian positions means to defend Christianity (and Milbank’s Ontological project of Radical Orthodoxy) from its own internal dissidents (for Milbank, these include certain Lutherans and Protestant fundamentalists). Rather than reading the cross as a site of penal substitutionary atonement or as the moment when Christ faced rejection from God (as is the case with Moltmann’s followers), Christians must accept the Patristic understanding of the crucifixion as the revelation of the absolute absurdity of death.

While this article serves as an overview of the structure of Milbank’s argument, one must read his essay to understand the richness of Radical Orthodox responses to Post-modernity. However, while Milank’s essay is excellent, I find myself wondering if it is not David Bentley Hart’s work, ‘The Beauty of the Infinite ’, which serves as a better articulation of Christian polemics against postmodern nihilism. More on this to come.

How does one come to have a self? Is the self an immediately given reality, or is it a ‘task’ as Friedrich Nietzsche argues? The purpose of this paper is to argue that C.S. Lewis’s work Till We Have Faces should be read as a commentary on the concept of selfhood and to put Lewis’s treatment of selfhood in conversation with Paul Ricoeur’s phenomenological narrative theory of selfhood. This reading will be contrasted to the Jungian psychological analysis that has been applied to the text, Christine Chou’s article, The Sacred Space Within. I hope to demonstrate that Ricoeur and Jung agree in many respects on how selfhood is formed, although Ricoeur offers a paradigm more directly applicable to Till We Have Faces.

In Ricoeur’s seminal work Oneself as Another, he argues that selfhood is inherently unstable and is formulated through the mediation of Idem and Ipse identity. Idem identity refers to ‘sameness’, the characteristics of a person that stay the same over time, such as height and hair color. Ipse identity refers to aspects of a person’s identity that are open to change, such as promise-keeping and ethical responsibilities. The space left between these two forms of identity is hermeneutically interpreted through cultural symbols. Ricoeur argues that these two aspects of identity are not immediately synthesized, but are rather mediated through narrative. It is only after a self-hermeneutic is done that a ‘self’ is established.

Ricoeur is opposed to a psychologized version of myth analysis offered by thinkers like Carl Jung. While Jung would argue that myths offer timeless examples of truths about the subconscious mind, Ricoeur articulates that myths and stories are symbols that offer new, fresh modes of being-in-the-world and of hermeneutical analysis. Each myth isn’t a representation of a preexisting ‘collective subconscious’, but rather is an example of genuine Arendtian human natality. A myth is a ‘breaking in’ of new meaning and possibility. This analysis of myth allows Ricoeur to escape the pseudo-ontological claims that Jung often falls into.

One possible form of narration, which is common in the modern age, is what Ricoeur calls first and second naivete. First naivete refers to the state of simply accepting appearances and the immediacy of belief before any critical reflection. An example of first naivete would be a child’s belief in Santa Claus. Historical criticism and science break apart first naivete and lead to a state of suspicion. However, Ricoeur argues that one cannot stay in this state of suspicion and must listen to the symbols that built up the first naivete to recognize that they offer new modes of subjectivity and selfhood. By recognizing the value of myths - for example, that Santa offers an insightful picture of gift giving - one achieves a state of second naivete. In a similar vein, Lewis writes to his granddaughter that “Someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” To put this another way, eventually one reaches an age when they realize that even their suspicious hermeneutical methods - think Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud - are themselves forms of storytelling and aren’t universal, dogmatic methods of establishing foundational truth. They can now return to myths to seek new truths.

Lewis’s insight into the importance of storytelling for the human condition culminated in his masterpiece, Till We Have Faces. Till We Have Faces is a retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche, as told from the perspective of Psyche’s sister, Orual. What’s of especial interest to us is that Lewis’s work is both a cynical, psychological study into Orual’s mind, and also a fantastical story which draws heavily from Greek mythology. I will argue that Orual’s journey is an example of a Ricoeurian self-hermeneutical process, which follows the form Ricoeur lays out of first and second naivete. This means that Lewis’s story is a meta-commentary on the use and role of myths in life. In this process, I will also engage with Lewis’s treatment of selfhood as connected with divinity.

In the beginning of the novel, Orual is a cynical character who is confined exclusively to the immediacy of life. Orual argues that there are no Gods because “Nothing that’s beautiful hides its face. Nothing that’s honest hides its name”. The hiddenness of God demonstrates his non-existence. Of course, at this point in the story, Orual is also hidden to herself. Her selfhood is fractured and will continue to fracture until she confronts the darker parts of her life story.

Embedded in the fallen nature of Orual’s character is her dogmatic belief that everything in the world can be explained by rational causes. Orual has taken this belief and applied it to her self-hermeneutical method; this means she refuses to acknowledge parts of her story that suggest divinity in order to create a false narrative of her life. As Fox says, “A shadow is to be an animal which is also a goddess which is also a god, and loving is to be eating - a child of six would talk more sense”. This belief manifests itself in Orual’s denial of transcendent reality when she has a flash of a palace which Psyche lives in, but then quickly denies it. She says “For when I lifted my head and looked once more into the mist across the water, I saw that which brought my heart into my throat. There stood the palace.” Immediately afterwards, this castle disappears from Orual’s sight, as she writes, “There was a tiny space of time in which I thought I could see how some swirlings of the mist had looked, for the moment, like towers and walls. But very soon, no likeness at all. I was staring simply into fog”. Already, Orual is self-interpreting. She understands this experience according to a rationalist methodology. This rationalist methodology is problematic, though, because it fails to account for parts of Orual’s life that she wants to repress. At this point in her life, Orual is still a ‘master of suspicion’, who dogmatically refuses to acknowledge transcendence.

Ultimately, Orual’s journey culminates in two opposing self-narrations. Her first narration takes the form of a legal case against the Gods. Viewed through a Ricoeurian lens, Orual is constructing a ‘self’ through narration, although this ‘self’ is one dominated by resentment and blindness. Orual has incorrectly utilized the opportunity for growth to construct a false narrative, which makes her into a victim. She has yet to honestly integrate the various parts of her life into a coherent narrative that is oriented towards the future. This self-narration serves as a veil, which Orual literally wears. When putting on her veil, Orual says, “I resolved that I would always go veiled. I have kept this rule, within doors and without, ever since. It is a sort of treaty made with my ugliness”. This is a symbolic manifestation of the interplay between her shattered Ipse and overly rigid Idem identities. Because Orual sees herself as a tragic figure, she justifies being a cruel ruler over the city. In her eyes, she is innocent, and every bad event in her life happened to her.

However, Orual’s narration is interrupted by two instances of different narration. One of these is when the priest of Ungit tells an alternative version of Psyche’s story, where Psyche was the one who knew the truth about the Gods, and that it was Orual who was spiritually immature. The other is when Ansit tells her that her love for Bardia was actually possessive and ruinous for her life. In these narrations, Orual is the one at fault for her actions. Additionally, her enlightenment-esque cynicism isn’t demonstrative of her intelligence, but of her spiritual immaturity and lack of openness to different possibilities. One can see Lewis’s criticism of Enlightenment rationality playing out here. However, because Orual cannot frame her life with purpose, she is left simply trying to please the Gods. She has no face with which she can engage with them. We can see the importance of Ricoeur’s analysis of selfhood examined through cultural figures at this point in the text. Cultural myths and storytelling allow Orual to examine her life reflexively. This demonstrates Lewis’s treatment of the importance of myths; contrary to a Jungian view, myths aren’t emblematic of a collective unconscious, but opportunities for reflexive self-understanding. They serve as hermeneutical ‘lenses’ with which one can come to genuine understanding.

It isn’t until Orual looks back at her own life story that she begins to realize how her actions and the way she framed her actions don’t align with each other. By reexamining her life, Orual sees her jealousy of Psyche and her possessive tendencies. This is further dramatized when she is forced to read out loud her story for the Gods in the underworld. Here, Orual realizes the rationalistic reading of her life was actually performative and is undermined by reality. She writes, “Now I knew that I had been reading it over and over... And the voice I read it in was strange to my ears. There was given to me a certainty that this, at last, was my real voice”. The false face of Orual is cast away, and she now has an opportunity to live out her story actively. Rather than viewing her life as being closed, Orual’s story becomes incarnate in what she chooses to do. Here, the relation between Ipse and Idem identity is synthesized.

By recognizing that she must work to complete her own story, Orual comes to have a face and therefore to be in alignment with divinity. This is a very Christian idea; the divine is indeed found in humans’ active decision-making processes and in the concrete everydayness of reality.

Additionally, when Orual looks at the tasks Psyche has to go through, she realizes that even her bad decisions contributed to a greater reality and truth. Rather than her pain being simply meaningless, it is connected to a meaning that outpaces Orual’s finite horizon of understanding. This explains why she hears that “you also are Psyche” as she comes to have a new face. Orual’s story contributes to a greater whole, allowing her to have selfhood.

Here, the tension between a Jungian and a Ricoeurian analysis of the story is brought to the forefront. In Chou’s analysis of Jung, Orual’s fractured state is a psychological complex that has taken the form of self-division. In Jung’s eyes, Orual’s multiple drives are conflicting, and she is repressing the darker parts of herself rather than integrating them into a whole. For Jung, Orual’s ‘self’ is fully existent, but covered over. In order to come to wholeness, Orual must discover her subconscious. There are several problems with this analysis. Firstly, as is often the case with psychoanalysis, the subconscious quickly becomes a nebulous term that can be used to smuggle in strange anthropological claims. After all, if the subconscious mind and psychological drives are never fully present, where exactly are they? One can think of the oft-repeated analogy of the conscious mind as being the tip of an iceberg with the subconscious floating below, which Lacan has pointed out is both unverifiable and not empirically grounded.

Ricoeur, on the other hand, can articulate the nature of the subconscious mind in a way that grounds itself in concrete everydayness. For Ricoeur, psychoanalysis isn’t a science, but a “semantics of desire.” This means the psychoanalytic research actively forms subjects rather than uncovering them. This analysis of what psychoanalysis actually is gives Ricoeur the ground to claim that subjects themselves are able to act out self-formation through narration. This claim is both deeply humanistic and Christian; it is the human agent who gets to make decisions and perform self-creation, not simply some structuralist system of oppression or a subconscious mind.

When connected back to Orual’s story, Ricoeur’s paradigm makes sense of why Orual needs to perform self-narration on herself to come to have a self. The various stories told to Orual aren’t symbolic reflections of her subconscious but rather vocabularies which help her to understand herself. Ultimately, the story of Till We Have Faces demonstrates the importance of a self-hermeneutical process for creating a sense of selfhood. When using Paul Ricoeur as a guide, one can see how Lewis’s treatment of selfhood and the importance of myths is made clear in Till We Have Faces. Indeed, Till We Have Faces is fertile ground through which readers can interpret their own lives, so that they too might come to have faces.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a criticism of Derrida’s poststructuralism from the perspective of a critical Augustinianism. This paper is more of a provisional articulation of an argument against Derridianism - a thinker who is notoriously slippery. It would take much more time to fully flesh out my argument but I hope to articulate the beginnings of my response, which ultimately relies on the problematic dualism in Derrida’s thought. I will begin with an analysis of Derrida’s criticism of the Enlightenment’s ‘mythic detached rationality’ from his works on Structuralism. Here, I will demonstrate that Derrida’s analysis of myth offers a death blow to any presuppositionless philosophy. Next, I will move on to Derrida’s concept of différance and demonstrate both how it falls back into the dualism he is trying to avoid and how it is insufficient to account for the real nature of Ontology. In the place of différance, I propose an Augustinian Trinitarianism to fill the void left by the death of self-grounding reason.

In 1784, Immanuel Kant wrote that Enlightenment was “Mankind’s exit from its self-incurred immaturity”. This narrative, that mankind was finally breaking free from the shackles of dogmatism into a brighter age of absolute truth, is incredibly powerful. It promised to finally do away with the unnecessary myths that cultures had grounded themselves in. In the place of myth would arise a neutral discourse, unbiased reason, which would be capable of self-grounding itself. This had a radical impact on Western culture writ large. One of these impacts was the collapse of the hold of Christianity on European culture. For Enlightenment thinkers, Christianity itself was too entrenched in the logic of myth to be of any value to society. The ultimate child of this trend in modernity is Positivism, a philosophical movement that aims to finally establish secular discourse as the backbone of reason. Positivism champions the progress of rational scientific enquiry over the naive speculation of religious myth.

Derrida’s project of Deconstruction, the dissolution of the history of Western Philosophy into various instances of ‘Logocentrism,’ offers a radical critique of this Enlightenment rationality. To understand Derrida’s argument, it is necessary to understand Structuralism, which he is building off of and critiquing. Structuralism, a branch of Sociology developed by Levi-Strauss, argued that languages are made up of ‘signs’, which mediate between a signifier - a word - and the signified - what the word references. Levi-Strauss thought that by examining signs themselves, he could come to a coherent understanding of culture. Derrida takes Levi-Strauss’s central insight, that one must examine the structures of language to do philosophy, but radicalizes the nature of the signified/signifier distinction. For Derrida, signs don’t point to anything outside of themselves, for this would create an unnecessary metaphysical dualism - they point to other signs within the system. Since a sign only has meaning in relation to other signs, and each sign can be compared to others in infinite ways, systems of language are inherently shifting and unstable. This means that all philosophical systems that attempt to describe reality end up simply playing with other signs within language structures. This means there is no neutral discourse, no play of signs within the system of signs which can claim an absolute stance. Derrida writes that “since these concepts are not atoms … every particular borrowing drags along with it the whole of metaphysics.”

However, the trauma of the ‘free play’ of signs, which demonstrates that there is no solid ground on which to stand, leads philosophers to attempt to ground themselves on a logos. This logos is both a member of the sign system and is external to the system. A ‘logos’ can be anything that serves the purpose of grounding reason, be it God, Platonic forms, or secular reason. However, since the logos must necessarily be a member of the discursive structure - since, after all, we are talking about it - it also must be dependent on all of the other signs. Therefore, there is no criterion by which to call the logos a grounding agent, for the word itself gets its meaning from the other signs. What Derrida demonstrates here is that there is no position outside of inherited structures of meaning—that which the Enlightenment had dismissed as “myth” returns as the condition of rational discourse itself. Like how Machiavelli said that the beginning of any civilization is marked by violence, Derrida thinks the beginning of any attempt to ground reason is marked by myth. Historical instances of myth, like forms of Paganism, Theism, and, as Derrida would like to argue, secular rationality, all demonstrate the human tendency to try to escape from the endless play of signs. Importantly, all of these myths seem rather immature to those who stand outside of them, for all people have their own form of logos that they operate. Derrida writes, “We have no language which is alien to this history; we cannot utter a single destructive proposition which has not already slipped into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest”. It is because of this that the logic of Positivism dies. There is no way to step out of the flowing variants of myth to a free, neutral space.

Derrida’s argument, when stripped of its mythic pretensions, is a well-articulated form of the postmodern malaise with modernity. The Enlightenment's attempt to finally ground meaning in itself failed to provide universal validity to arguments and to offer a solid cultural basis from which to live. Derrida’s analysis of signs functions as an attempt to transition from the static rationality of the Enlightenment to a living form of philosophy that constantly disrupts existing paradigms and meanings. This ‘living philosophy’, which grounds itself in nothing and takes nothing too seriously, is Derrida’s attempt to fill the void left by his analysis. Here, Derrida’s move makes sense of John Milbank’s claim that “the history of postmodernism is naught but a series of footnotes on Nietzsche”. In other words, Nietzsche’s idiom that ‘God is Dead’ can now be translated into secular terms: Reason itself has died and left behind it a vacuous abyss. This is exactly what Derrida is articulating in his principle of différance, the infinite deferral of meaning into traces. But what is this ‘living philosophy’ which Derrida is articulating? And, is it enough to provide a philosophical basis for which current philosophy and culture can actually pursue goods?

Derrida is well aware that if he makes the structures of language equal to the structures of Being, then he is back to doing the strong metaphysics he hopes to avoid. To escape this temptation, the Derridean theory of sign systems makes a strong distinction between Being as such and language. For Derrida, being is always mediated through language, which is broken. However, if it’s true that language is inherently distinct from reality, then Derrida has created a dualism that makes humans into the masters of language. Strangely then, Derrida has fallen back into a form of radical Positivism which sees humans as ‘making sense’ of the world through tools, one of which is language. This is in line with the pragmatist reading of Derrida, which is articulated by Richard Rorty. After all, Rorty is himself somewhat of a Positivist thinker, and his championing of Derridianism demonstrates that perhaps Derrida was nothing other than a rather strange pragmatist to begin with. However, if Being is qualitatively different from language, then there is no way in which one can speak of anything at all, including the sign theory which Derrida himself articulates. This flaw in Derrida’s system does not undermine his response to secular modernity, though; rather, it shows that secular rationality fails on its own terms (those terms being the dream of reason, which points to nothing outside of the immediate usage of language). So then, the modern Derridian must either propose a strong metaphysics of ambiguity or accept the dualism inherent in Derridian thought and become a pragmatist (as is the case with Rorty). This will be a problem for Derridians, as I will demonstrate later.

According to John Milbank, the vacuous hole left by postmodernity leads thinkers to either a nihilistic pagan paganism or to a platonic, participatory realism. Paganism here is defined as any metaphysics that proposes an ontology of violence between various opposing forces or beings. Nietzsche is an example of this pagan tendency in modern philosophy; he grounds himself in the multivarious aspects of reality and their competition. For him, Being itself is violent and contradictory. This abyss behind reason is the ‘will to power’, the violent movement which characterizes all beings. Similarly, a Derridaian, which makes no distinction between language and being, characterizes reality as différance, the trace of meaning left between the free play of signs. Reality for both of these thinkers is grounded in multivariousness and uncertainty. There is no single metaphysical principle that defines reality; rather, there is an endless play between various opposing forces. Problematically, though, this argument really just assumes a Kantian picture of knowledge as mediated through untrustworthy mechanisms. Derrida has claimed to eliminate all transcendental categories and replace them with Differance, which ends up simply assuming a rather strange metaphysical picture of language and reality.

Viewed in this light, the project of Nietzscheanism and Derridianism is really a reversion back to a form of pre-Christian paganism. The same logic that made Manicheanism appealing to Augustine is what makes Nietzscheanism appealing to his postmodern audience. Nietzsche’s explicit drawing from Greek polytheism demonstrates this inherent feature of his thought. Of course, as both of these thinkers should recognize, this makes their own systems of thought into instances of a new - or rather, an ancient - mythos. Derrida has not escaped the principle of myth as much as he would have liked to. Additionally, these forms of pagan mythos, which make rather strong metaphysical claims, often fall into nihilism, where meaning is unreal, and humans have no agency. With the collapse of logocentrism, one is left with the question, not of which system best aligns with secular reason, but which form of mythos offers the most robust account of reality. Is there a form of mythos which is not internally incoherent, as Derrida demonstrates secular rationality to be? Can Ontology be both a monism and not fall into static, nonrelational principles? It is here that I agree with Milbank that it is Christianity, and specifically its neo-platonic, trinitarian variants, which offer an escape from the pagan tendency huh of modern philosophy. Christianity in these forms is not an instance of logocentrism, which makes God into simply an explanation or ground for discourse. Rather, a non-dualistic Christian Ontology makes no real qualitative difference between language systems and being. This leads to what Milbank calls the “Ontology of Peace”, as opposed to the “Ontologies of Violence” which often characterize modern thought. An Ontology of peace places supreme value on harmony and cooperation between beings rather than on violence. This form of Christian metaphysics turns out to make sense of all of the various forms of cultural myths.

As opposed to the sign theory of language laid out by Derrida, I propose an alternative language theory, drawn from the medieval Christian tradition, that fills the aporias left by Derridian suspicion. The dichotomy then becomes not between Secularism and Deconstructionism, which I hope to have proved are really both just instances of Positivism, but between Platonism and Cartesianism. Here, I draw my argument from Augustine’s doctrine of the Trinity. This theory is embedded in a Trinitarian ontology that sees trinitarianism not as a simple add-on to Christian metaphysics but as the very structure of reality and being itself. This Trinitarianism also recognizes that the structure of being is analogous to that of language.

In De Doctrina Christiana, Augustine makes a distinction between words and things. For Augustine, words always point beyond themselves towards real realities. However, all words and concepts point not only beyond themselves but also ultimately towards God as the ground and ultimate truth of all things. Therefore, language for Augustine falls under the Neoplatonic schema of participation. Signs in a language system garner their meaning not through their relation to other signs - as Derrida would like to argue - but rather participate in the intelligibility of reality and God themselves. Augustine’s picture here is that of a radical monism - reality itself is an expression of the divine life, which means it grounds itself not in something external to itself, but rather is always already participating in God’s being. However, even though words garner their intelligibility in God, they can never fully exhaust the Trinitarian life. This is because they are always a weaker version of expression from the divine Godhead.

Augustine’s Neoplatonic doctrine of language allows him to both get away from the problems Derrida raises and sublate the truths found in Derrida’s system. This is in part because Augustine’s argument doesn’t fall to the temptation of logocentrism, where that which grounds a system of thought is always both external and internal to a word system. For Augustine, intelligibility per se always points towards the divine life and contains traces within it which highlight aspects of divinity. Therefore, there is never one system of words contained within the word schema that can contain the fullness of God. For Augustine, God is always the principle of infinite excess. However, unlike Derrida, who argues that meaning is never fully present in a given moment, Augustine believes that everything in the world is always saturated with the presence of God. His vision of the Beatific Vision, where man will finally escape the shackles of temporal existence to fully rest in the presence of God, is the culmination of Augustine’s philosophical project.

Additionally, for Augustine, the world itself is always an expression of the divine Trinitarian life. This is that the trinity is both one and three parts. This means that paradoxically, Augustine can recognize each object in the world in its radical particularity while still believing that everything is grounded and lives through one divine principle. The trinity is then inherently a system of relations between loving persons, each of whom garners their being and intelligibility from the other two. The divine dance of the trinity is expressed in the oneness and multiplicity of the world itself. Additionally, the trinity has within itself the relation of language - the logos - and the speaker - the Father. It turns out that even to speak is to express the divine relationship of the father to the son, who speaks the son into being while not having this spoken word alienated from himself. To summarize, for Augustine, there is a deeper unity beyond difference, while for Derrida, there is a hidden difference between seeming unity. Augustine has therefore taken the best aspects of a pagan Ontology and monistic philosophies and synthesized them within a greater unity. The question we are left with now has to do with the Derridian conception of myth. Does Augustine’s doctrine of language and the Trinity fall into another oppressive instance of myth, where opposing voices are silenced in the name of a present metaphysical principle? Can Augustine’s Ontology really enter into conversation with all of the other forms of myth?

I believe that the Augustinian ontology allows for conversation with other religions insofar as Augustine always grounds himself in radical humility. Because everything in the world, including even false arrangements of words which represent false forms of myth, points towards the godhead, who is the very excess of meaning itself, then there is always much to learn from other traditions. Since God finds full expression only in his speaking forth of the Son and always exceeds the spoken world, Augustine must necessarily say that his system cannot contain the fullness of God. What it can say, however, is that everything points towards the father because that is necessarily always contained within any form of discourse. Then, for a Christian to participate creatively in the movement of the Trinity literally means to engage with other positions. Each of these is a form of “Egyptian Gold”, by which the Christian comes to a fuller knowledge of the Father. It is here that Derrida’s oversimplification of the history of philosophy into simply various forms of logocentrism turns out to be oppressive. Indeed, if Derrida is right, then there can be no genuine conversation between positions because each position is itself a meaningless expression of words that point to nothing outside of themselves. While the Augustinian believes that everything contains (at least limited) aspects of the truth, the Derridian believes that no one has access to any truth at all. This is for all except, of course, for Derrida himself, who has the unique vantage point to recognize that all of the myths by which cultures exist by are really nothing at all. It turns out that for all of his discourse on listening to the other, Derrida can’t really listen to the other, for they don’t have anything to teach him.

In this paper, I will offer a picture of Paul Ricoeur's relationship with Hegel, starting with Ricoeur's rejection of the Hegelian and Kantian epistemological framework and then transitioning from this to Ricoeur's theory of meaning. This will argue that Ricoeur's logic of the ‘broken dialectic’ is the important but insufficient step to his philosophy of meaning. I argue that it is specifically Paul Ricoeur’s theory of aesthetics that offers a framework to understand meaning as directly opposed to Hegel's logic of sublation. Here the logic of sublation is replaced by a logic of iconicity—one that preserves difference and generates meaning without resolving it into conceptual totality. 

Ricoeur on Hegel

In the third volume of Ricoeur's magnum opus, Time and Narrative, Ricoeur engages with Hegelianism using a guiding watchword: Renoncer à Hegel (renouncing Hegel). In many ways, Ricoeur's entire career captures the intellectual zeitgeist of his age, that is, responding to the pervasive influence of Hegelianism on Continental thought. In this regard Ricoeur follows directly in the footsteps of Heidegger and Husserl by arguing for a phenomenological understanding of consciousness. Hegelianism, according to Ricoeur, advocated a systematic totalization of particulars into a single whole. This meant that, for Hegel, everything becomes an instance of the absolute concept, which is the movement of spirit knowing itself. Ricoeur argues that while Hegelianism is a tempting philosophical framework for thinkers as it aims to systematically explain every phenomena, it ends up reducing important aspects of human existence to a lower status.

While many modern philosophers attempt to simply go back to a Kantian epistemological theory, Ricoeur refuses any form of Transcendental Idealism. Even though Ricoeur calls himself a ‘post-Hegelian Kantian’, he believes that the Kantian logic of Idealism often must ground itself in a Cartesian or Fichtean ‘transparent subject’. This subject is a self-positing, self-grounding entity. However, Ricoeur adopts the Freudian insight that the self-transparent ‘I’ is a myth insofar as it always necessitates the follow up question of what exactly this ‘I’ is. For Ricoeur, Kant has also fallen into a similar temptation as the transparent ‘I’ by assuming there are a-temporal, A Priori facets of human consciousness which can be known through an analysis of human consciousness. However, in order for Ricoeur to reject Hegel and Kant outright, he must have a theory of how meaning is produced by subjects.

Ricoeur's Ethical Critique of Hegelianism

Firstly, it is important to understand why Ricoeur himself is not a Hegelian. Probably the most significant reason for Ricoeur's rejection of Hegel's system is that he saw the totalizing logic of the Aufheben as being ethically dubious. Here Ricoeur is somewhat similar to Soren Kierkegaard, who thought that Hegel’s system could account for everything except the singularity of the individual. Ricoeur grounds his philosophy in the radical finitude of human understanding, calling himself a ‘Post-Hegelian Kantian’. While there are genuine insights one can garner from Hegel, for Ricoeur, there are always scandals of existence which exceed human conscious mastery. Here Ricoeur is deeply influenced by Gabriel Marcel's existential analysis of the ‘mysterious’, that being, the fundamental questions of human existence with which humans are actively caught up with. Ricoeur is opposed to any Augustinian notion of a ‘Felix Culpa’, where present violence becomes a productive step towards some future good. For Ricoeur, it is in Hegel that the logic of the Felix Culpa is carried to its most extreme; where even the absolute must go through violence to understand itself. Ricoeur thought that this way of conceiving of violence retroactively legitimized suffering victims. Ricoeur's ethical critique is inseparable from his epistemological position: any system that claims total knowledge risks justifying suffering by retrospectively integrating it into a rational whole.

Dialectical Tension as Opening a Space for Understanding

In a similar way that the finitude of understanding necessarily needs to leave open the question of suffering, so too does it require that the aporias of human existence remain unresolved. This is why Ricoeur advocated for a paradoxical ‘broken dialectic’ in the place of the Aufheben which recognized the inherent aporias of human existence rather than sublating them within a system. While Hegel believed that true understanding happens only when a subject reaches conceptual closure, understanding for Ricoeur happens as a process subjects undergo as they work in the space between opposing ideas. Therefore, understanding is not made through sublation of the other or through the inherent structures of subjectivity but rather is made possible by the tension inherent in the dialectical nature of human experience. To use a political example, the classic tension between communitarianism and individualism gives the subject the space to work through difficult questions about human existence and human political life. Both political positions possess aspects of the truth which the subject has experienced, but are inherently in conflict with one another. While Hegel, according to Ricoeur, would try to sublate both these positions into one, clean, synthesis, (as Hegel himself does within his work, ‘On the Philosophy of Right’) Ricoeur refuses this move. Indeed, it is only in the contrast between opposing ideas that new meaning is produced. In order to not fall prey to what Hegel called the ‘night in which all cows are black’, where contradictions are seemingly overcome into a false unity, Ricoeur wishes to acknowledge each end of the dialectical pole in its radical particularity.

However, while Ricoeur's understanding of the ‘broken dialectic’ is somewhat distinct from Hegel's theory of sublation, Ricoeur believes that it is not yet enough to overcome Hegelianism. This is because the ‘broken dialectic’ still relies on the tension between negation and affirmation to support itself. This means that his ‘broken dialectic’ is somewhat still trapped within Hegel's system because even Ricoeur's position can potentially be sublated within a larger rational totality. Ricoeur's criticism of Hegel is sharp; Hegel gives a metaphysical status to negation and affirmation, while Ricoeur believes these shouldn’t be given real, ontological status. In order to break free of the shackles of the totalization of Hegel, Ricoeur follows Heidegger in claiming that it is in the analysis of ‘Being’ where Hegel's system falls short. Ricoeur believes that in the analysis of ‘being’, the metaphysical status given to affirmation and negation falls apart. Part of the reason the ‘broken dialectic’ fails is that dialectical poles fail to disclose being as long as they restrain themselves to ontical descriptions of beings. Indeed, any discourse on being which restrains itself to literal descriptions of things, to that which is (a temptation which Ricoeur believes Hegel falls into) fails to capture the depths of Being. But if not from the dialectic, from where does Ricoeur believe that Being can be disclosed?

It is here that Ricoeur's theory of art becomes very important. While Heidegger believed that it was in existential analysis of Dasein where being was disclosed, For Ricoeur, it is art which possesses the ability to disclose attributes of being. In order to support this radical claim, Ricoeur first lays out his theory as to the origin of the work of art. Importantly, this theory places absolute importance on the role of the subject's engagement with art. This theory as to the origin of a work of art draws from both the Kantian and Aristotelian tradition. Ricoeur calls this the movement of Mimesis one, two and three, a term borrowed from Aristotle's Poetics. 

The Threefold Movement of Mimesis as the Origin of the Work of Art

Ricoeur labels Mimesis one ‘Prefiguration’. The prefigured world indicates the vast reservoir of pre-existing cultural resources for art. These include symbolic, structural and temporal features of a given culture. Since even the Cartesian “I” must be indirectly mediated through preexisting signs, a work of art cannot be created Ex Nihilo. Rather, it must always be drawn from the well of preexisting resources in a culture.

Mimesis two is the process of ‘Configuration’. Here Ricoeur draws from the Kantian notion of the ‘productive imagination’ to argue that the second movement of the aesthetic act is to narrate and make sense of the contradictory nature of the experiences of Mimesis one. Given that reality is always phenomenologically given as contradictory, the human being must use their faculty of configuration to make sense of and narrate experience. Here Ricoeur draws from his notion of the broken dialectic. The contradictory nature of experience opens up the space where one can, and indeed must, narrate and make sense of reality. This configuration gives the ‘capable individual’ autonomy and the freedom to narrate their own lives.

Mimesis three is Refiguration, which happens after the work of art is created. Refiguration relates to how the work of art becomes a part of the prefigured reservoir of cultural resources. The original context of the work of art, which includes things like the author's psychological intent and the cultural situation in which it was produced no longer plays an essential role in the production of new meaning. Rather, refiguration happens in the relation between an observer and the work of art itself. The work of art contains within itself the possibility to “liberate” the audience by revealing to them new potential horizons of understanding. Ricoeur's logic here is strikingly similar to Gadamer's notion of the “fusion of horizons” which happens in the event of reading and understanding. For both of these thinkers, the work of art is only fully actually in the process of being observed, where there is a participatory ‘happening’ of meaning.

The Creation of Metaphor as an Example of Mimesis

Ricoeur offers an example of the threefold movement of Mimesis with his analysis of metaphor. In the movement of metaphor, Mimesis one includes preexisting symbols and words. These symbols are put into contrast with other symbols in the movement of configuration and are then released into the world of the ‘prefigured’ for the rest of the culture. For example, to say that ‘love is a fire’ is to take two concepts, love and fire, and ‘augment’ both of them in light of each other. Ricoeur points out that certain metaphors are actively productive of meaning while others are ‘dead’ and clique.

Ricoeur's theory of metaphor was developed in conversation with, and is directly opposed to the Derridian critique of metaphor. For Derrida, Western Metaphysics has always been obsessed with the same. Metaphor was the beginning of a violence-doing which makes two concepts equivalent and has been hidden since metaphysics inception. The ultimate culmination of the Western ‘metaphysics of the same’ for Derrida is Hegel's systematic usage of the Aufheben which wishes to reduce all things into instances of the absolute concept. In order to move towards a philosophy of differance, Derrida rejects metaphor outright.

However, as opposed to Derrida, Ricoeur thinks that art isn’t simply a decorative feature of reality which violently reduces all particulars into instances of the same, but is essential to create new meaning. This is because metaphor doesn't simply point out a similarity between two concepts, but rather augments both concepts in light of the other. The same is true for a work of art; a painting draws from and puts in contrast various cultural symbols. The tension between particulars is productive of new meaning and Ontological disclosure. This potentiality for new meaning is always contained within the symbols which make up the prefigured world. Ricoeur's analysis of metaphor and art here demonstrates a response both to Derrida's rejection of metaphor and to the Hegelian logic of definition by negation. When one puts something in a work of art, it doesn't simply define the particular as the particular, it augments the particular in light of another particular. Importantly, this contrast between poetic images can never be itself contained within a concept; it must be left as the poetic image if it isn’t to lose its particularity. Ricoeur has here rather radically escaped the false theory of metaphor which caused Derrida to reject metaphor outright. Art for Ricoeur is precisely that which highlights differences while maintaining unity.

Indeed, as it turns out, Ricoeur's theory of metaphor as contrast between different concepts is strikingly similar to the notion of the ‘broken dialectic’, where opposing poles of negation and affirmation are contrasted with each other. Here Ricoeur's logic of productive tension is brought to its fullest manifestation in metaphor. All new forms of meaning arise out of the prefigured symbolic world being reconfigured by the subject. Similarly, new meaning arises out of the ‘broken dialectic’ because of the subject's engagement with the argumentative world they find themselves in. Therefore, the ontological status Hegel gives to affirmation and negation as being real movements of spirit has been escaped by Ricoeur. This is because dialectics are themselves structurally similar to metaphor. Indeed, Ricoeur's logic of a ‘dead metaphor’ as being a symbol which used to have productive tension but now is cast to the prefigured world of lifeless signs highlights why dialectical tension needs to be maintained. The reason why the ‘broken dialectic’ should never be resolved is because they would make it ‘dead’ and subjects would no longer be able to narrate their lives and pursue agency by interacting with it.

Ricoeur's critique of Hegelian Aesthetic Theory

Now that Ricoeur has laid out his understanding of the origin of the work of art, he aims to lay out an analysis of how his theory differs from Hegel's. Ricoeur's central criticism of Hegelian aesthetics is that he believes Hegel's theory looks too much like the Neo-Platonic logic of Methexis, that is, that art is a weaker copy of an ideal form. For the Neo-Platonists, Methexis described how reality intelligently participated in the One through a hierarchy of being. For them, reality was ‘a copy’ of a more true and more fundamental reality. Ricoeur, deeply inspired by Nietzsche, thinks that this discourse ignores the importance of lived experience and imminance to subjects. For Ricoeur, every individual deserves ethical and ontological status. In other words, the individual is equally as important as the Neo-Platonic ‘one’ (here the similarity between Kierkegaard and Ricoeur is very clear). With this criticism of Platonism, the contrast between Ricoeur and Hegel becomes especially sharp. For Hegel, true infinity is not simply the temporally infinite continual movement of the finite, but the Begriffs full self-realization in itself. Therefore the absolute is only the absolute in the full movement of spirit understanding itself. This means that each stage in the history of spirit is a step on the road towards the absolute concept. It's because of this theory that Hegel believes that art is nothing more than “the idea in sensuous form”, or one step towards absolute knowledge of the absolute. Therefore, art is always “a thing of the past” which must be usurped by philosophy as the ultimate science. Even though Hegel is certainly not a Platonist, he still gives ontological priority to the absolute and not to particulars. Therefore, for Ricoeur, he has strangely fallen for the same illusion as Plotinus.  Indeed, Hegel's beliefs about art still remain trapped within the metaphysics of the dialectic insofar as they assume that art serves to bring absolute spirit to a fuller knowledge of itself. Ricoeur attempts to escape this metaphysical account with his theory of how art discloses ‘Being itself’, not ‘Being’ understood as the absolute, but as the essential ground of all that is.

Ricoeur offers an account of the importance of art with his concept of “Iconicity”, a term explicitly drawn from Christian understandings of icons. Icons augment understandings of reality rather than replacing them with an alternative account. For example, when Cézanne paints a mountain, he doesn’t simply ‘copy’ a more fundamental reality onto a canvas. Rather, he augments the mountain's beauty by offering an alternative picture of it. For Ricoeur, to say that an artist simply replicates features of a given being would be to fall for the Platonist logic Ricoeur wishes to escape. Rather, the artist participates in the very creation of beauty itself. This means that the painting of a mountain brings something new into the symbolic world which was not there previously. But, how does art possess the capacity to bring out new forms of beauty? Indeed, if art is always created out of the prefigured world, doesn’t it restrain itself to descriptions of that which already ‘is’?

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Art possesses the capacity to bring new forms of beauty into the symbolic world by what Ricoeur terms the movement of first and second order reference. First order reference deals with strictly factual descriptions of reality, or with each given being. This includes the sciences and historical understanding. Second order reference, which includes the arts, doesn’t point back towards regular things. Rather it points to deeper modes of being itself by asserting something which both ‘is’ and simultaneously ‘is not’. For example, a Greek Tragedy asserts a story about reality which is not, literally speaking, true. However, one would be hard pressed to believe that Antigone doesn't disclose aspects of subjectivity and being. Since art points towards that which both ‘is’ and ‘is not’ it refuses any positivistic, ontical, reading. Indeed, by asserting that which ‘is not’, art can open up new worlds of understanding which exist beyond factical realities. The space of the ‘is not’, inherent in all processes of artistic creation, gives the ‘capable individual’ room to creatively create new meaning and expand understandings of being.

For Ricoeur, in the moment of utilizing second order reference, in creating art, the subject recognizes that there are deeper aspects, not only of beings, but also of being itself. These deeper truths can only be accessed through second order reference. Art utilizes the previously existing symbolic universe while still creating new meaning by asserting things which ‘are not’. For this reason Ricoeur says that art is a "symbolic exploration of our relationship to beings and to Being," deeply rooted in the "common symbolical ground of humanity". 

Indeed, for Ricoeur, it is the experience of art which breaks down to totalizing logic of Hegelianism insofar as it discloses both the finite subject and the being / beings distinction (this disclosure is of course essential for Heidegger and Schelling's rejection of Hegelianism). The finitude of the subject is disclosed in the creation of art because the artist recognizes that art never comes out of nothing, for the artist, according to Mimesis Two, must always draw from a preexisting well of cultural resources. The subject then recognizes that they are already operating within a symbolic world which they did not create and which they do not master. The same logic applies to the disclosure of being; the subject comes to be confronted with being in poetry and second order descriptions of reality. However, Ricoeur is explicit in saying these descriptions can never exhaust the plenitude of being, or as Ricoeur calls it, the ‘surplus of meaning’. Unlike Hegel, Ricoeur thinks there is never a fully grounded understanding of being. But, unlike Kant, Ricoeur believes that the subject can know real aspects of being through metaphor and art. Ricoeur does, however, draw from Hegel the belief that art is an essential mode of coming to understand being; in fact, through second order reference, it is perhaps the subject's primary way of accessing truth about being.

At this point in the analysis of Ricoeur's thought in comparison with Hegel, one can draw a rather distinct theory of being. While Hegel reduces ‘being’ to be nothing more than the totality of existing beings (at least according to Heidegger and Ricoeur), or to that which ‘is’, Ricoeur argues that being, by its very nature, is ‘infinite surplus’. Therefore, at least phenomenologically, reality is the infinite expression of being coming to more expansive representations of itself, a process which subjects creatively participate in. Therefore, reality always expands towards deeper expressions of being, which is driven by the tension between existing things (or the ‘broken dialectic', as Ricoeur calls it).

This means that Ricoeur's thesis offers a unique path outside of the totalizing logic of Hegelianism through the movement of Iconicity. This Iconicity, while taking the insight from Hegel’s analysis of art as the “idea in sensuous form”, refuses dialectical closure and therefore any false notion of absolute knowledge. Rather than viewing reality as slowly moving towards closure, Ricoeur believes that art reveals the dynamic nature of all meaning. This analysis could be useful for various philosophical movements which aim to offer a phenomenological analysis of aesthetics. For example, John Milbank's project of ‘radical orthodoxy’, which offers an account of creative ontology drawn from figures such as Augustine and Nicholas of Cusa, could apply Ricoeur's analysis of the Kantian ‘productive imagination’ to show how subjects engage with artwork. Indeed, Ricoeur's understanding of reality as always going to deeper and deeper expressions of being is remarkably similar to Milbank, who aims to restart the project of Hegelianism from a uniquely orthodox standpoint. Indeed, as many modern thinkers have pointed out, philosophical movements which ignore Hegel often do so out of reverence for Hegel's system, which they fear so much as to refuse to engage with. If Heidegger was right that Hegel offers the final account of Metaphysics, where no longer ‘beings’ should be analyzed but rather being itself, Ricoeur's analysis of art as a unique mode of being which discloses attributes of Being is a unique vantage-point.

Works Cited

Volume Five Number, K., & One. (2011). The Capable Human Being and the Role of Language in Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutical Philosophical Anthropology (pp. 51–61). https://www.kritike.org/journal/issue_9/mara_june2011.pdf

Seebohm, T. (1978). Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 7(2), 257–270. https://doi.org/10.5840/gfpj19787212

MacIntyre, Alasdair C, and Paul Ricoeur. The Religious Significance of Atheism. Books on Demand, 1 June 1969.’

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Curry Barker’s new horror movie, Obsession, is so overtly Lacanian that I struggled to believe there are not already dozens of articles offering insights into the movie’s rich symbolism. While I am by no means a Lacan scholar, I hope to offer my own interpretation to further mine and my readers’ understanding.

Curry Barker, following other horror directors like Jordan Peele, began his career with short-form comedy sketches. Barker’s videos often feature awkward conversations that occur in everyday life, often where one character violates a cultural norm. As opposed to typical, comforting conversations which fill day to day life, Barker’s characters respond ‘incorrectly’. This incorrectness, or negativity, reveals the trauma of the Lacanian Real which hides behind day-to-day life. One can think here of the classic distinction between New England and Southern states. In New England, when someone asks if your day is going well, the response is meant to be a simple and meaningless ‘good’. Pausing and actually answering the question is unbearable for New Englanders. These interruptions to the symbolic order constitute both comedy and horror, which explains the two genres’ intimate relation. Indeed, one can perhaps say that a comedy is simply a horror movie that scoffs at, rather than fears, interruptions in symbolic order. . One can easily imagine an alternative version of Obsession which characterizes Nikki as a comedic figure; a fool so enraptured by the other that they lose themselves and their dignity. Here we can see the strange, yet intimate connection between Nietzsche’s concept of the laughter of philosophers and Hegel’s ‘pure negativity’ (this ‘pure negativity’ belongs at least to the pseudo-deconstructionist Hegel espoused by Zizek and McGowann).

The central thesis of Obsession appears in the conversation between Bear and Nikki, moments before Bear is about to express his desire for his potential lover. Here, Nikki says the novel she’s been working on is about love, rather than romance. Bear’s failure to understand the distinction between love and romance (or, as we can supplement, desire versus excessive desire) marks the naïveté of his wish for Nikki’s love.

According to Lacan, the cause of desire is a fundamental lack that constitutes subjectivity. This subject, while really being identical to this lack, attempts to cover up this lack with the object petit a. This stands for the object of excess desire, which always remains just out of the subject’s reach. We can think here of Goethe’s Faust, or Augustine’s notion of the ‘restless heart’. Subjects, while being constituted and driven by a fundamental lack, only ever interact with the Symbolic world they find themselves in. The lack is violently expressed in instances of what Lacan calls the ‘Real’. The Real never appears as an object in and of itself, but only as a failure in the symbolic order. To use Lacan’s famous example, the Freudian slip, where the subject accidentally breaks the symbolic structure, comes not from a substantive ‘unconscious’, but rather expresses the lack in the heart of consciousness. In a similar vein to how Machiavelli said that the beginning of every civilization is marked by a crime, Lacan believes that behind every symbolic structure there exists the Real.

The first Freudian slip in Obsession happens in Bear’s wish for Nikki’s love. This wish comes straight from the lack within Bear; it is so violently opposed to the symbolic structure of morality he occupies that he only dares say it alone. With the fantastical fulfillment of the wish, Nikki becomes an empty signifier that only expresses the excess desire of Bear. Because she is exclusively constituted by this lack, she speaks directly from it, without a symbolic order. When she stumbles back out of her house, she expresses this violation of the symbolic order by saying that she feels off because her cat died. Ironically, this is the very lie that Bear tells to himself to justify his wish for Nikki’s love. In this moment, Bear enters into a relationship with himself, with his own desire.

As the relationship between Bear and Nikki continues, the two of them increasingly come to occupy a strange symbolic order. This order shows up as an obstacle for Bear, even though it was constructed entirely by him. Therefore, the key Lacanian/Hegelian thesis (which has been brilliantly exposed by Zizek), that “in fighting the alienated substance, the subject really fights themselves,” is expressed in Bear’s horror at Nikki’s strange behavior. This behavior is really just the logical conclusion of Bear’s perverse fantasy for Nikki’s love. This fantasy, the object petit a, according to Lacan, is not some added on aspect of subjectivity. It inherently defines subjectivity.

The structure of their relationship, or perhaps we should call it a non-relationship, gets increasingly disturbing as time goes on. Bear’s house gets torn apart, and his friends all worry for him and Nikki. That which produces the change in their symbolic structure is the various instances of the Real. The Real first manifests in expressions of guilt, where Nikki puts Bear’s cat on a shrine and cooks him his cat for lunch, an ironic demonstration of the subject consuming their own shame. However, the actual Real in Obsession is Nikki’s real personality, which Bear constantly represses. When Nikki first starts kissing Bear, she snaps back into her real self and screams, interrupting Bear’s fantasy. In what is perhaps the most disturbing scene in the movie, the real Nikki, while occupying the subliminal space between sleep and consciousness, asks Bear to kill her. This is a dramatic interruption of the Real into Bears fantasy world. What appears as a normal relationship to Bear is revealed to be a violent repression of the other.

In another telling scene, Nikki and Bear participate a party game where participants must tell the truth or take a drink. The allure of the game is that one might accidentally let loose their private fantasy, accidentally gossip on themselves. Nikki however, confidently stands and reads a private excerpt from her novel (the very same one from the beginning of the movie which was about love, not romance). What Nikki reads is a perverse story about a violent incestual relationship. This harkens back to how the real Nikki said she feels that Bear was like a brother to her. Therefore, in a deeply Lacanian fashion, even the Nikki infatuated with Bear still has a private fantasy. However, this perverse fantasy is the Real, is a symbolic representation of her incestuous relationship with Bear. The scene of the party game gives Nikki the space to express the truth of her being.

In Obsession, Bear is driven by a masculine desire for the other’s desire itself. He doesn’t just want Nikki, he wants her to want him. The desire for the desire of the other is precisely what constitutes romantic relationships. Bears’ breakdown later in the movie, in which he asks his love to “just act like Nikki!”, represents his realization that he has been occupying an empty symbolic world. To enter into a romantic relationship would require Bear to recognize Nikki as a subject and not a vessel for his own fantasy.

Here, the distinction between ‘love’ and ‘romance’ becomes clear. ‘Love’, or excess desire, is not romance precisely because the other is constituted exclusively by the subject’s desire. There is no intersubjective dance between opposing desires, no playful, symbolically mediated exchange of love. Rather, there is only the raw, unbearable expression of the Real.

That Nikki’s excess desire breaks apart even the logic of Bears fantasy demonstrates the key Lacanian insight that it is only from within a symbolic order that the subject can operate. As Zizek points out, the ironic Lacanian twist to Ivan Karamazovs realization that “without God all things are permitted” is that really the truth is that “without God no things are permitted”. If there is no symbolic order for the subject to participate in, there is no room for any enjoyment; nothing can shape the subjects desire. However, the desire itself is always oriented towards a goal which should never be reached.

There is a potential reading of the movie which sees Bears wish as being a worse version of his true fantasy (If only Bear had phrased his wish slightly better…). This would be in alignment with a Post-Modernist nihilism which sees the subject as always unable to express their true self. However, the real Lacanian point is that Bears wish was exactly what he wanted. This explains why the storekeeper who sells Bear the wish-a-willow asks him not to come back like the others did. All wishes, because they are born from the object petit a, necessarily consume the subject. It is only after getting Nikki that Bear realizes that what he truly wants is to want (what Freud called the sublimity of desire). This explains why, in the closing moments of the film, Nikki wishes for Bear himself to love her as much as he does. Here, absolute desire coincides with itself, it is drawn back upon itself and therefore negates itself. This is why Bear died in his beloveds arms, for there is no longer a story to tell when desire doubles back and destroys itself.

While Obsession fulfills many aspects of Lacans thesis, one can argue that it still falls short of true Lacanian logic. This is because the movie still assumes the Liberal ‘independent subject’ who remains in control of themselves. The end of the movie places Nikki in a position of autonomy. Her subjectivity is still constituted by inner depth rather than lack. This gives the audience the impression of what Badiou calls ‘Democratic Materialism’, where subjects are self determining entities. However, the truly Lacanian move is to show that Nikki herself is really nothing other than an instance of lack; that she has no positive substance. This is to say, as Hegel did, that the absolute is simply the movement from nothing, through nothing, to nothing.