Paul Ricœur, Archaeology and Teleology (IV)
Our last entry concluded with a schematic interpretation of Ricoeur’s gnomic “identity thesis” (as I have taken to calling it). This thesis states that, in the Freudian program, the archê of desire and the telos of self-consciousness — hence the archaeological and teleological “hermeneutics” organized around them — are somehow “identical.” Yet this idea has been systematically overlooked in the self-understanding of Freudianism. The latter’s “teleological” ingredient has remained merely implicit, as has — naturally — the relation of that ingredient to the explicit and more familiar “archaeological” meaning of Freudianism.
So Ricoeur writes: “Freud links a thematized archaeology of the unconscious to an unthematized teleology of the process of becoming conscious” (FaP 461). Incidentally, I think this formulation ought to be held firmly in mind in all discussions of Ricoeur’s conception of the “archaeo-teleological principle.” For it fixes in a perspicuous way that “end” toward which analysis, the patient — indeed, the human animal per se — implicitly strains. A “teleology of the process of becoming conscious” tacitly subordinates other ends “for the sake of which” a human being might act — say, power, love, pleasure, fame. This is not to deny that such ends may figure, and prominently, in a given life (albeit in varying degrees and proportions). It is to claim, however, that — so far as the true “final cause” of Freudianism is concerned, indeed, the consummation of its very archê, desire — every rival human end receives its significance from advancing this “process of becoming conscious.”
This is perhaps Ricoeur’s analytic twist to the “teleology” promoted by Aristotle, whose Nicomachean Ethics famously begins: “Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.” Of course, Aristotle himself quickly establishes that “the highest of all goods achievable by action” is that Eudaimonia (flourishing, fulfillment, happiness) studied in ethics and political science. This condition, in short, is the “final end” or “highest good” for human beings — “it is for the sake of this that all men do whatever else they do.”
The hidden telos that Ricoeur excavates from the Freudian program and its grounding concepts is scarcely “flourishing” per se — an unlikely proposition given the dim prospects that Freud allows to human beings for ever satisfying the “pleasure principle.” It is rather, again, self-consciousness.
Ricoeur and Hegel
These comments on Aristotle raise the question of philosophical “influence" in a way I have avoided until now. In fact, both the “form” and the “content” of Ricoeur’s procedure in these areas is quintessentially, self-consciously Hegelian. Ricoeur openly credits Hegel with inspiring his ideas, and Freud and Philosophy contains several expositions of passages from the Phenomenology of Spirit. (At other times Ricoeur appears to be drawing from the Philosophy of Right, without citations.) Here I would like to elaborate on the Hegelian substance of the “archaeo-teleological principle,” in particular:
Form. As we have seen, Ricoeur claims that, upon examination, the two positions or modes of reflection designated “archaeology” and “teleology” — seemingly irreconcilable alternatives — form a kind of “identity.” This sort of gesture is supremely Hegelian. That is, Hegel has become closely associated with the philosophical effort to demonstrate that the “poles” of some abstract dichotomy — say, subject and object, or freedom and necessity, or fact and value — are in fact mutually-determining, “identical.” In Hegel’s language, philosophy involves constructing “speculative identities” between ostensibly antithetical terms. Moreover, the demonstration of these “identities” assumes a particular shape that, again, Ricoeur knowingly echos. That is: following Hegel, Ricoeur attempts to show that one pole of a dichotomy will “realize” itself as the opposite pole; that, so to speak, an item can only become “what it is” by inverting itself into its conceptual antithesis. This method constitutes, as Hegel’s disciples have named it, a type of “immanent criticism,” since one derives the entire “movement” or “action” out of resources internal or “immanent” to the object of analysis. In the context of Ricoeur’s project, this means: upon analysis, we discover that the archê of desire only “realizes” itself, becomes properly what it is, in the telos of self-consciousness.
Content. But it is not only the form of argument that Ricoeur has assimilated from Hegel — the mere type of immanent or dialectical analysis that issues in “speculative identities” between seemingly antithetical concepts. Beyond this, Ricoeur capitalizes on the content of Hegel’s thought, that is, a specific instance of this analysis from the Phenomenology of Spirit. The very conceptual dichotomy we have now examined at length, between the archê of desire and the telos of self-consciousness — Hegel centers, analyzes, “works through” this same dichotomy in the Phenomenology’s celebrated chapter “Self-Consciousness.” The most incisive statement of Ricoeur’s identity-thesis, that “self-consciousness is desire” (466) — for arche and telos are one — is not merely “inspired” by Hegel; it is written by him: “self-consciousness is desire itself” (¶167). Of course, the meaning of this identity — let alone its concrete demonstration — will naturally look rather different in the context of 20th century Freudianism than it does in Hegel’s 1807 text. What matters is that, notwithstanding the strictly “archaeological” appearance of Freud’s naturalistic architectonic of the primitive, “desiring” mind, still, it cannot be coherently grasped without reference to its “teleological” consummation in self-consciousness. In both cases, we are effectively told that “desire,” properly conceived, is always the desire to become self-consciousness, to experience the sentiment of self and thus “know oneself.”
There is at least one additional step to this interpretation of Ricoeur’s archaeo-teleological principle — that human desire is finally a desire for the “end” of self-consciousness, hence that archê and telos are one. Fortunately, we already made a start in our commentary on the second “criterion” of a psychoanalytic fact: that in analysis desire is always other-directed, a plea for recognition.
Now, in endorsing the Hegelian trope that human “desire” is essentially a desire for recognition, Ricoeur likewise revises the meaning of human “satisfaction.” After all, one cannot revise a concept of desire without also revising the concept of satisfaction which answers to that desire. A biological urge or need — hunger, say — admits of biological satisfaction — foodstuff. By contrast, an interpersonal need demands a correspondingly interpersonal satisfaction — something on the order of acceptance, approval, validation, recognition, and the like.
But Ricoeur does more than this. For along with the Hegelian notion of a desire for recognition, he has appropriated the “epistemic” implications Hegel derives from it. Our drive for the other’s recognition — literally, re-cognition — is itself an aspect or phase of the quest for knowledge, “the task of consciousness,” and finally self-consciousness. We are “conscious” of ourselves, we know what we are, in and through our experience of others. Thus — assembling the different pieces of Ricoeur’s picture — we may retrospectively construe all human behavior as accessory to this drive for “self-recognition in the other.” I think the following syllogism roughly captures the thought:
In the psychoanalytic context, human desire is always at bottom a desire for recognition;
The desire for recognition is itself best understood as a desire for self-knowledge — my self-concept, my idea of myself, is only fully possessed when it is “validated” by another. (Indeed, in the first instance I only “know” myself through the other — one’s self-concept originates here.); therefore
In this rather expanded sense, human desire is essentially the desire for self-consciousness
For these reasons, teleology will necessarily figure in precisely those psychoanalytic explanations that seem most archaeological.
Now, one may justify a “weaker" version of Ricoeur’s claim in a straightforward way, a strategy that would obviate much of the forgoing discussion. For surely teleology of some sort is inseparable from analysis inasmuch as its central locus, desire, by definition presupposes an “end.” Even the earliest, infantile desire — which lives on as unconscious fantasy, contouring the full sweep of adult experience — is a desire for something: to possess the mother and eliminate the father.
Yet Ricoeur’s claim, again, is not merely that psychoanalysis implicitly contains some end or another. The telos he identifies is a quite specific one, namely, “the task of consciousness,” “the process of becoming conscious,” and the like. So, for evidence of his thesis, Ricoeur would not be content to point out the desire-indexed “ends” that pervade every analysis. (These would surprise no one.) His point is rather that, alongside Freudianism’s regressive “reduction” of these ends to their archaic prototypes, and precisely through this reduction, one advances the supervening, teleological “task of consciousness.” Paradoxically, it is just this “archaeological” work that realizes our “aptitude for progression, which analytic practice puts in operation, but which the theory does not thematize” (492).
For this reason, the desires expressed in analysis are never simply distorted repetitions of archaic prototypes — though they are surely that as well. One may reduce the patient’s “ends” (a promotion, a lover, a mansion), to their infantile precursors (the breast, the phallus). But that very interpretation, in the analytic setting, will then constitute the more-or-less conscious appropriation of these prototypes. It activates our “aptitude for progression” by escorting the infantile desire to its proper terminus in self-consciousness.
Hence the archaeological explanation, interpreted to the patient in the analytic context, itself enables and demands the complementary teleological explanation. The archaeological interpretation, “your desire for a mansion is unconsciously a desire for a phallus” — provided it hits the mark, “takes roots” — will license the teleological conception, “my desire for a mansion has served the “end” of making my infantile desire self-conscious.