Paul Ricœur, Archaeology and Teleology (II)
Our last discussion ended on a hopeful note. We considered Ricoeur’s proposal that, alongside Freudianism’s explicit, essentially fatalistic “archaeology” — and in seeming opposition to it — we may also discover an implicit, non-fatalistic “teleology.” This possibility is developed at length in Freud and Philosophy. Ricoeur’s claim is that, upon examination, Freud’s “archaeology of the subject” bears “a relationship of dialectical opposition to the complementary concept of teleology” (459). Indeed, this seems to follow as a necessary inference: “In order to have an archê a subject must have a telos” (459). What does Ricoeur have in mind here, exactly?
We saw in the last entry that Freudian “archaeology” connotes a certain “disenchanting” explanatory drift: whatever in human affairs seems mature, complex, even noble, is “reduced” to something archaic, simple, and base. The patient’s ostensible desire for career promotion is in fact, unconsciously, a desire for a phallus. “Modern” liberal democracies are in fact, and notwithstanding their idealized self-understandings, governed by the same dynamic principles as the primitive horde. And so on with this “regressive hermeneutics,” which only ever achieves “a revelation of the archaic,” or “a manifestation of the ever prior” (440). In particular, analysis invariably divines, just beneath the deceitful surface of human mentality and behavior, “our timeless, immortal, indestructible desire” (453). Hence Freudianism
“unmasked the strategy of the pleasure principle, the archaic form of the human, under its rationalizations, its idealizations, its sublimations. Here the function of analysis is to reduce apparent novelty by showing that it is actually a revival of the old” (446)
This is what is involved in the “archaeology of the subject” — a subject whose essence accordingly is, and ever remains, “indestructible desire,” the unsurpassable “strategy of the pleasure principle.”
And yet, to repeat: Ricoeur has also told us that archaeology somehow entails the “complementary concept of teleology,” and that “to have an archê a subject must have a telos” (459). What do these formulations mean? To begin with the well-understood: if an archê — in the present case, the subject’s archaic desire — is the “prior,” the “beginning,” the “foundation,” and the like, then a telos is the “posterior,”the “realization,” the “end.” In a general way, we can say that teleological reasoning shows — or attempts to show — that an item exists, or is so-constituted, “for the sake of” some other item, or “in order to” advance some “end.” This is perfectly commonplace, of course. Every “explanation” of an action (e.g. a walk to the library) with reference to an intended outcome (e.g. “in order to” check out a book) makes use of a teleological idiom. Checking out a book is the telos or “end” that governs the walk. (Aristotelians would distinguish between “efficient” causes [in which the earlier accounts for the later] from “final” causes [in which the later accounts for the earlier.])
This idiom, we can now appreciate, is the diametrical opposite of “archaeological” reasoning, in the sense Ricoeur has specified. It is “the complete contrary of a genesis of the higher from the lower” (467). Whereas archaeology illuminates the later always with reference to the earlier, teleology inverts the order of explanation, such that the earlier is illuminated by the later — that is, its end. So the simple yet powerful thought is that we may legitimately “grasp” a thing — in this case, human mentality — with reference to both (a) its Archê, its prehistory, and (b) its Telos, its post-history.
But if a telos is, generically, “that for the sake of which” something is or occurs — such that this “end” explains that thing — we may then ask: what specifically might this involve in the context of Freudianism? What — in however latent or disregarded a way — is its “end” or “ends”? Only when we have a satisfactory answer to this question will we be positioned to understand Ricoeur’s additional, more cryptic claim: that the archê and telos of Freudianism are somehow inwardly related and, indeed, “identical.”
One passage, which I quoted in the last entry, begins to give shape to this telos:
“[I]n a direction contrary to the regressive movement psychoanalysis sets forth in theory, there must be supposed an aptitude for progression, which analytic practice puts in operation, but which the theory does not thematize.” (492)
Thus analytic practice presupposes in human beings — in the analysand specifically — an “aptitude for progression.” Now what kind of progression is this? Or again: towards what, in which direction, does someone “progress” — especially, though perhaps not exclusively, under the influence of analysis? Earlier Ricoeur had distinguished Freudianism’s explicit archaeology (an “economics”) and its implicit teleology (a “dialectic”) as follows:
“[T]he oscillation between a dialectic and an economics, between [1] a dialectic oriented toward the gradual emergence of self-consciousness and [2] an economics that explains the ‘placements’ and ‘displacements’ of desire through which this difficult emergence is effected” (483, bracket numbers mine)
Plainly, the psychoanalytic telos we are attempting to identify is for Ricoeur connected with “the gradual emergence of self-consciousness.” In fact, the emergence of self-consciousness precisely is this telos. Our inborn “aptitude for progression,” presupposed by an analysis, moves in this direction.
Once again, we may look to Ricoeur’s early essay, “Consciousness and the Unconscious,” for intimations of this teleology. In fact, even then, Ricoeur had explicitly framed his theoretical objectives in terms of just this theme. The entire essay builds toward an answer to the question of teleology:
“Following the revision of the concept of consciousness imposed by the science of the unconscious, and after the critique of the ‘models’ of the unconscious, what is at stake is the possibility of a philosophical anthropology which can take up the dialectic between consciousness and the unconscious. What world view and vision of man will make this possible? What must man be to assume the responsibility of sound thought and yet be susceptible of falling into insanity, to be obligated by his humanity to strive for greater and greater consciousness and yet remain a product of topographic or economic models insofar as ‘the id speaks through him?’ What new vision of human fragility— and, even more radically, of the paradox of responsibility vs. fragility — is required by the sort of thought which has allowed itself to be decentered from consciousness through reflecting on the unconscious?” (100-101)
The “end” signaled in this passage — the human being qua human “strive[s] for greater and greater consciousness” — appears as “the” quintessential analytic end, a category which will encompass and supervene upon all other, particular ends. And even here it is the opposite number, so to speak, of the archê — desire — the unsurpassable foundation of this same human being, who thus “remain[s] a product of topographic or economic models insofar as ‘the id speaks through him.’” In this way, Ricoeur positions
the archê of primitive, infantile desire and
the telos of progress in self-consciousness
as together the alpha and omega of the analytic project or, alternatively, of the human being construed analytically.
Even in this passage, however, Ricoeur presents the two, not as mutually exclusive opposites, nor again as the poles of a continuum on which phenomena may plotted — closer to one or the other — but rather as inseparable, mutually-dependent “moments” of the human being überhaupt.
I will attempt to elucidate this mutual-dependence in the following entries. For the moment, though, let us recapitulate what we have learned and describe, as plainly as possible, Ricoeur’s use of these two concepts. In Freudianism, an “archaeological” explanation — alternatively, a “regressive hermeneutics” — refers the later to the earlier, the modern to the archaic, the complex to the simple, and so on. What appears “new" is in all events exposed as the old, a recurrence of the same. More specifically, and quintessentially, the analyst interprets the adult patient’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors as “mere” manifestations of a largely unconscious core of infantile desire. The stakes here are existential. So Ricoeur refers, in his more rarefied philosophical language, to the “positing of desire through which I am posited, and find myself already posited” (439) — a “prior positing of the sum [being] at the heart of the Cogito”(439). What a human being essentially is — one’s sum — is accordingly synonymous with a “desire” that precedes every self-reflection. This desire, then, is the foundation or archê of Freudianism.
At the same time, however, Ricoeur has proposed that this same Freudianism, so closely associated with its grand archaeological gestures, also contains an implicit “teleology.” Generically, we saw, teleological reasoning pertains to ends. One “grasps” an item — say, a piece of human behavior — only by identifying that telos “for the sake of which” it is undertaken. If I do x (buy groceries), “in order to bring about” y (make and eat dinner), then y illuminates the occurrence of x. In a way that can seem relatively puzzling, then, according to teleological reason, the “later” (making and eating dinner), is somehow required to grasp the “earlier” (the act of buying groceries).
But the implicit teleological ingredient which Ricoeur discerns in Freudianism evidently has to do with a specific “end”: namely, the human “aptitude for progression” towards “the gradual emergence of self-consciousness,” or the obligation “to strive for greater and greater consciousness” and precisely “through reflecting on the unconscious.”
Let us now put Ricoeur’s theoretical proposal into the scholastic vocabulary we have been entertaining. Like any teleology, Freud’s will suppose that a later item, y, may explain an earlier item, x — provided x exists or occurs “for the sake of” y. If our interpretation of Ricoeur’s proposal is correct, he is suggesting that the same applies to Freudianism. For here, too, x — human thought, feeling, and behavior — is illuminated by that y — the enlargement of self-consciousness — “for the sake of which” it occurs. Thus it follows that one and the same item, human mentality, can be referred in explanation both to (a) the earlier, the archê of infantile desire, and (b) the later, the telos of self-consciousness.
Now, Ricoeur’s conclusion here is arguably at once obvious and rather obscure. It is obvious because no reader of Freud can overlook the latter’s enlightenment ethos: indeed, the whole point and purpose of his archaeological “excavations” can be nothing except “insight,” the self-illumination of mind. Hence the promise of an enlarged self-consciousness is scarcely an “implicit” end of Freudianism but, on the contrary, its persistently advertised centerpiece.
At the same time, logically speaking, it is hardly obvious how one can reconcile (a) Freud’s militant archaeology, in which the “archaic” always and exhaustively explains the “modern,” with (b) precisely this enlightenment commitment to the “end” of illumination — or any “end,” for that matter — running in the opposite direction. How could Freud’s totalizing archaeology contain any room at all for such a “progressive hermeneutics” — that is, for the idiom of in order tos and for the sake ofs?
In the next entry we will begin to address this question.