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4 The Incurved Self Perhaps that is what put Des in such a thoughtful mood—honest and selfcritical —that afternoon. “Do you know the Shakespearean admonition ‘To thine own self be true’?” he asked. I nodded, of course. “It’s premised,” he said, “on the idea that ‘thine own self’ is something pretty good, ‘being true’ to which is ‘commendable.’ What if ‘thine own self’ is not so good? What if it’s ‘pretty bad’? Wouldn’t it be better not to be true to thine own self in that case? You see, that’s my situation.” —Whit Stillman, The Last Days of Disco, with Cocktails at Petrossian Afterwards The purpose of this chapter is to work out two related claims regarding how to think about the fallen self, i.e., the self in sin. First, following on the relational ontology we sketched in the previous chapter, we need to think about sin relationally rather than in terms of substance and accidents. Second, in order to understand sin, we need recourse to figurative discourse. Taking Ricoeur as a point of departure, in the first section we will see why reflection on sin and evil requires a hermeneutics of figurative discourse. Sin and evil cannot be explained , but must be described. Phenomenological description will not, however , render sin and evil transparent, because theirs is an irreducibly opaque phenomenality. Consequently we need a hermeneutics of sin and evil in order to gain some understanding of them. In the second section I give a hermeneutical investigation of the incurved self—i.e., the self curved in on itself in sin. The image of incurvature is helpful regarding both of our aims: to think fault figuratively , and to figure it relationally. Interpreting Sin and Evil: Opaque Phenomena and Hermeneutics There are philosophical as well as theological reasons why reflection on sin and evil needs to be hermeneutical in nature. First, sin and evil cannot be adequately conceptualized or illuminated through direct reflection; they are phenomenally opaque. This is a central insight in Ricoeur’s early trilogy on the Philosophy of the Will, which will be our first point of departure. The Incurved Self 57 Bracketing and Figuring Fault Freedom and Nature, the first volume of Ricoeur’s trilogy, aims at an eidetic description of the essential “meanings or principles of intelligibility” of willing—a sort of “keyboard of human nature.” These eidetic principles are not Platonized Ideas or forms, but they are essential elements in a schematic understanding of the will and therefore precede any empirical description of particular actions (FN 3–4). In the interest of this eidetic description, Ricoeur finds it necessary to bracket two constitutive features of human activity: first, he brackets transcendence, which “hides within it the ultimate origin of subjectivity ” (FN 3). Second, he brackets fault, which is the “corrupt state” of selfdivision and self-bondage that “profoundly alters” the intelligibility of human action (FN 3, 20 n. 9). Ricoeur believes that fault is an indispensable feature in any robust account of human agency, but it is necessary to bracket it because (1) phenomenology is incapable of treating it adequately, and (2) eidetic description limits its inquiry to essential structures, whereas fault is a concrete actuality rather than an essential structure of the human being. Fault is “alien,” “an accident, an interruption, a fall.” Eidetic inquiry can disclose certain principles of intelligibility regarding the interaction of the voluntary and the involuntary, but there is no such principle of intelligibility for the contingent disruption that is fault. “The fault is absurd” (FN 24). It must therefore remain in brackets. Ricoeur’s next volume, Fallible Man, shifts from a general eidetics of the will to an empirics of the will. Ricoeur considers the specific question of fallibility, but here too the actuality of fault remains in brackets. Instead, Ricoeur investigates the structures that make human beings uniquely capable of fault: Why is fault an existential possibility for human beings but not animals, plants, and minerals? Since fallibility is the possibility of fault (FM 143), there is a qualitative gap that separates this investigation from the next volume, The Symbolism of Evil. This is the gap in which evil is posited. However, at no point does Ricoeur try to explain or account for the “leap” that actually posits evil. This is a crucial and deliberate omission, attesting to the opacity of evil (FM 142f.). Instead , The Symbolism of Evil starts from the other side of this gap, after sin has been posited...

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