The Wild Region in Life-History

3: Self-Identity and the Experience of Alterity

3 Self-Identity and the Experience of Alterity A burden of longeval tradition lies on the notions of the same and the other. Since Plato’s doctrine of the “great kinds,” it has been repeatedly attempted to penetrate the obscure region to which these notions belong. Advances on new paths have recently been made toward this region in contemporary French philosophy.1 Some of these fresh undertakings lend themselves to consideration especially if a proper access to the experience of alterity in life-history is sought for. We may take as an appropriate starting point for our investigations Paul Ricoeur’s interpretation of self-identity in its interdependence with alterity. This interpretation is opposed in Oneself as Another to Edmund Husserl’s endeavor to understand the other than self as a modified self, as well as to Levinas’s attempt to show that the self is nothing without the other than self. It remains to be seen to what extent this double opposition is justifiable. In order to decide this question, it is necessary to consider, first, Husserl’s view of the relationship of what is one’s own and what is alien to oneself. This view may, second, be confronted with Maurice MerleauPonty ’s conception of a wild alterity. Third, the radical turn Emmanuel Levinas gives to the notions of the same and the other has to be dealt with in depth. It should become clear how this radical turn finds its emblematic expression in the Levinasian characterization of the subject’s self as “the Other within the Same.” The main goal of these investigations is to show how the experience of a radical alterity is to be integrated into the picture we have been trying to form of the relationship between self-identity and life-history. The importance of a contrast between “proper” and “alien” alterity, as well as 92 93 S E L F - I D E N T I T Y A N D T H E E X P E R I E N C E O F A L T E R I T Y the significance of a distinction between “wild” and “alien” alterity for this purpose will emerge in the course of the following considerations. I. Narrative Identity and Alterity Ricoeur bases his distinction between the identity in the sense of idem and in the sense of ipse or, to put it in a simpler way, between the same and the self, on a special kind of self-understanding. In contrast with Cartesianism, he does not fall back upon an immediately available—and supposedly indubitable—certainty. On the contrary, he holds—using a term borrowed from Martin Heidegger—that no certainty of the self is to be reached without having recourse to attestation. Attestation, however , does not cease, as he adds, to be haunted by doubt and tormented by suspicion.2 That is why, relying this time even more on Nietzsche than on Freud, he radicalizes his earlier expression of a “wounded” cogito,3 evoking now no less than a cogito brisé, a “shattered cogito.”4 Although Ricoeur does not intend to contest the subject’s capacity of reflecting upon itself, he can clearly see the difficulties which have been raised by the philosophies of reflection. He takes inspiration from analytic philosophy in order to overcome these difficulties. He enters into a debate with P. F. Strawson, Donald Davidson, and Derek Parfit because , through this confrontation, he expects to be able to give a “realist twist” to the comprehension of the self.5 However, he by no means wants to question the indispensability of reflection. On the contrary, what he aims at in his long debate with analytic philosophy is nothing else than the elaboration of a reliable argument for the indispensability of reflection . This endeavor takes shape in a formula that may remind us of Merleau-Ponty: a “chiasm between reflection and analysis” is envisaged.6 This formula alludes to a far-reaching enterprise which is properly designated as a “phenomenological hermeneutic of the self.”7 In contrast with analytic philosophy, Ricoeur does not set himself the task of exploring personal identity from an external perspective. Neither does he try to expound a criteriology showing how to decide, in dubious cases, the question of people’s personal identity. He commits himself to an internal perspective in his interpretation of self-identity. He relies, therefore, upon a certain kind of self...