A Passion for the Possible: Thinking with Paul Ricoeur

Capable Man, Capable God

Capable Man, Capable God R I C H A R D K E A R N E Y For some thirty years I had the honor of conducting a dialogue with Paul Ricoeur on the subject of the ‘‘possible.’’ This dialogue extended from our initial exchanges during Ricoeur’s seminars at the Center for Phenomenology and Hermeneutics on Avenue Parmentier in Paris, some of which (like ‘‘Myth as the Bearer of Possible Worlds’’) were published in the late 1970s, to my doctoral thesis under Ricoeur’s generous supervision, Poétique du possible (defended in 1980 and published in 1984), and finally to my more recent reflections on the eschatology of posse in The God Who May Be (2003) and After God (2006), reflections that Ricoeur cites in a final entry to Vivant jusqu’à la mort (2007).1 Throughout this extended philosophical conversation Ricoeur’s profound understanding of what he called l’homme capable and its counterpart, le dieu capable, never ceased to inform my own modest efforts to think in his wake. By way of felicitous coincidence, one of the last communications I received from Ricoeur contained mention of a projected volume entitled Capable Man, conceived as terminal counterpart to his seminal volume Fallible Man. In what follows I attempt to show how these twin aspects of fragility and capacity, limit and potency, mark Ricoeur’s enduring quest for an ontology of the possible. Ricoeur’s path toward an ontology of the possible steers a middle course between traditional metaphysics, which thinks being in terms of presence or substance, and skeptical deconstruction, which often considers being a 49 screen against the radical alterity of the other. While the former, often termed onto-theology after Heidegger, privileged notions of first Being as actus purus or ipsum esse susistens, the latter speaks more of différance and désastre, that is, of the impossibility of being understood as a totalizing identity . It is between these poles of extreme presence and extreme absence that Ricoeur navigates his via media—an itinerary guided by a wager to render human existence, in all its frailty and finitude, capable of meaningful being in spite of everything. Ricoeur traces a neglected genealogy of the ‘‘possible’’ from Aristotle’s dunamis and Spinoza’s conatus right up to a contemporary phenomenology of the ‘‘I can.’’ Above all, Ricoeur seeks to found his analysis on a concrete description of the living human being as it acts and suffers in the everyday world. Following Merleau-Ponty’s claim that the ‘‘I can’’ precedes the ‘‘I think,’’ Ricoeur identifies a rich plurivocity of ‘‘possibles’’— epistemological, moral, historical, practical, poetical, ontological, and eschatological. I cannot do justice to this complex variation here, but hope, nonetheless, to give a basic sense of Ricoeur’s understanding of ‘‘possibility’’ by looking at a number of key texts where he discusses this pivotal concept. Let me begin with Ricoeur’s telling observations on the subject in two recent interviews, one entitled ‘‘The Power of the Possible’’ (2006), the other ‘‘A colloquio con Ricoeur’’ (2000).2 Commenting on Heidegger’s claim for the primacy of dunamis in his 1931 course on Aristotle’s Metaphysics , Book Theta, Ricoeur explains: ‘‘The analogy of action operates as a highly differentiated phenomenology of I can speak, I can act, I can narrate , and imputability, that is to say the capacity to designate myself. So I would say that it is a phenomenology of I can which permits me to privilege the reading of the dunamis-energeia relation at the level of its capacity to articulate a phenomenological discourse.’’3 Ricoeur then proceeds to inscribe his own phenomenology of the possible in the specific register of human action and passion. ‘‘All the I cans,’’ he says, ‘‘are structured by the idea of a suffering and acting being. . . . Redescending from the notion of being as action, as energeia and dunamis, I find the field of application in an anthropology of an acting human being. And the notion of an acting being finds its application in a very concrete, very descriptive phenomenology : what does it mean to be able to speak or not speak and so on. What are the modalities of potency that respond to the modalities of nonpotency .’’4 It is at this decisive juncture that Ricoeur relates his analysis to Spinoza’s innovative claim to overcome the metaphysical dualism of dunamis and energeia, combining both under the notion of conatus.5 Ricoeur also introduces here the Leibnitzean...