2

Toward a New Paradigm for Philosophy of Religion

MAURICE BOUTIN

We sometimes put research in the service of refusing to find anything out.

—Peter Sloterdijk (2004)

While taking for granted that the predicate of a proposition is deemed the most intelligible, the following proposal draws attention to three statements and then suggests (4) that freedom is the basic dynamism of finitude provided that finitude ceases to be identified, and thus confused, with limitation. The three statements are: (1) human being is fragile; (2) human being is fallible; (3) human being is finite.

Human Being Is Fragile

This is the emphasis made by Yves Ledure (1920–2012) in Transcendances: Essai sur Dieu et le corps (1989). Ledure’s endeavor sets up a new distribution within the human relational realm with reference to a precise goal. This requires uncovering a hidden dimension of corporality whose ending is objectified in terms of transcendence. What is at stake is at once a conquest over the immanence and distortions of human history, over doubt, over the mortal absolute—a conquest that the divine is—and a personal effort toward immortality, plenitude of life, self-permanence (i.e., eternalizing as the most basic desire of human corporality). The overall relevance of this desire is constant in Ledure’s book. All through his argument, the reflection goes from what life generally is to the singular living being characterized by an extreme fragility that sets it apart in the universe.

The human as such is the place for revelation and the encounter with the divine. The transcendent thus cuts across each and every human existence and the whole history of humankind. There is no historical figure of the transcendent being other than human being as a whole. God’s incarnation is an extraordinary assumption of human being, and yet it takes place at the expense of a fragilizing of the divine. God’s incarnation should be understood literally: in Jesus of Nazareth the divine assumes corporality along with its rules and constraints, and in Jesus’s humanity the meeting point of history and the transcendent is achieved. Jesus’s story is not only the expectation of full personal accomplishment; it is the full realization of life itself. Yet this personal accomplishment remains something historical and as such constantly longed for. Here, transcendence is not merely rational, it is historical. In other words, transcendence is in keeping with human personal becoming, and such becoming is the reason why transcendence is never total transparency, even in Jesus of Nazareth.

God’s incarnation is kenosis: in Jesus, the divine strips itself of transcendence. Jesus is just a human being, in everything similar to a human being. Such is the enigmatic figure of God’s incarnation Ledure calls the fragility of the divine. The visibility of transcendence is away; only the divine naming remains: “Lord” (an indication of transcendence). The only figure—however obscure—of the transcendent is human history. In it the divine completely empties itself to the point that human history seems to be stripped of all transcendence and to be the exclusive arena of human activity. More than any other before, our present era experiences this. As long as human beings were subjected to natural determinism, this subordination was deemed a spontaneous and immediate expression of transcendence. However, with the growing human control over nature, this kind of supply means has disappeared and, nowadays, God’s incarnation is total: it leaves history autonomous and human beings in control over their destiny. At the core of such human destiny, the incarnated transcendent is active, though not as some external, alien(ating) force. God’s incarnation forces us to figure out the transcendent as part of human interiority, which is its greatest accomplishment since it raises corporality to the dimensions of the absolute.

The gnostic readings and the docetic interpretation of God’s incarnation attest to the difficulty of acknowledging that the human body is capable of being the transcending God. Of course, Christian ontotheology does overshadow such capacity. And yet the incarnation of the transcending God entails the accomplishment of anthropology and thus becomes the secret of anthropology. By putting God’s incarnation at the center of its discourse, Christianity resumes what is latent in today’s anthropologies: human self-affirmation. But more than that, because it gives something ultimate to human self-affirmation and opens up a future that corporality alone—on account of death—cannot hope for.

For Ledure, the task consists in deciphering the positive core of transcendence as a call for human freedom and a way toward self-accomplishment. This is not just pure possibility, that is, a reality stripped of itself. On the contrary, freedom as a choice does away with tyrannical immediacy and opens up a promising future. It does not in any way end up in some sort of air pocket, that is, in hopeless idealism content with the management of a present situation stripped of any future perspective.

Human Being Is Fallible

Fallible Man ([1960] 1986) is the title of the first part of Paul Ricoeur’s (1913–2005) Finitude and Guilt, the second volume of his Philosophy of Will. As Walter J. Lowe (in Ricoeur [1960] 1986, xxxv) reminds us, Fallible Man “is not concerned with the concrete manifestation of fault, whatever its form may be [the notion of fault was elided in the first volume of Philosophy of the Will devoted to The Voluntary and the Involuntary], but rather with that in humans which permits fault to arise: fallibility.” The word “fault” should be taken

in the geological sense: a break, a rift, a tearing. Ricoeur frequently uses the words faille (break, breach, fault), which is akin to faillibilité, as well as écart (gap, di-gression), fêlure (rift), déchirement (a tearing, torn) to describe human being’s existential condition. The same sense is provided by the verb “to err” (in the sense of wandering, going astray, deviating), which is retained in aberrant and error. Ricoeur’s book, therefore, is concerned with that which allows for the possibility of a “rift” in human beings, what enables them to “err,” to become divided against themselves and thereby to become the “flawed” creatures. (Lowe in Ricoeur [1960] 1986, xxxv)

According to Ricoeur ([1960] 1986, 146), “fragility is not merely the ‘locus,’ the point of insertion of evil, nor even the ‘origin’ starting from which human being falls: it is the ‘capacity’ for evil. To say that human being is fallible is to say that the limitation peculiar to a being who does not coincide with himself is the primordial weakness from which evil arises.”

What Ricoeur calls ‘disproportion,’ or ‘discord’ (e.g., Ricoeur 1986, 75, 141), is a constant issue in Fallible Man; it comes time and again in all kinds of contexts. His goal is to work out an “anthropology of fallibility” (82) in three steps. The first two steps deal with transcendental imagination whose work is “to take the thing and the person for reflective references” (81), the second step still remaining “quite formal, having escaped a transcendental formalism only to enter upon a practical formalism, that of the idea of the person” (69). The third step pertains to the “heart,” the Gemüt, feeling.

Ricoeur sketches his argument as follows:

In advancing step by step from consciousness in general to self-consciousness and then to feeling, or, in other words, from the theoretical to the practical to the affective, philosophical anthropology progresses to a heightened sense of inwardness and more fragility. The moment of fragility of consciousness in general is, we recall, the transcendental imagination, a blind spot of knowledge transcending itself intentionally in its correlate, the thing. Consequently the synthesis of speech and appearance is a synthesis in the thing itself, or rather in the objectivity of the thing. The second moment of fragility is that of respect. It corresponds to the project of the self or the person. But the paradoxical, disproportionate constitution of respect is transcended intentionally in the representation of the person, which is still a kind of objective or objectival synthesis. The “heart,” the restless heart, would be the fragile moment par excellence. All the disproportion that we have seen culminate in the disproportion of happiness and character would be interiorized in the heart. But the question is whether a philosophy of the “heart” is possible. It must be a philosophy which does not relapse into the pathétique, but which is foregrounded in the level of reason which is not satisfied with the pure and the radical, but which demands the total, the concrete. The direction in which we must look is shown to us by the very movement of the preceding reflection. That reflection is made up of a reduction of the pathétique. But that pathétique is not devoid of all thematic structure; it was not utterly alien to the sphere of speech for it even has a language proper to it, that of myth and rhetoric. Therefore, if that pathos is already mythos, that is, speech, it must be possible to reconstruct it in the dimension of philosophic discourse. Now, this mythos bespeaks the primordial crucifixion that is the misery of the intermediate being. A merely transcendental reflection of the thing does not fully restore that theme, nor does the practical reflection on the person. If a philosophy of feeling is possible, it is feeling that should express the fragility of the intermediate being that we are. In other words, what is at stake in philosophy of feeling is the very gap between the purely transcendental exegesis of “disproportion” and the lived experience of “misery.” The two questions are connected, the question of method and the question of substance: the question of the possibility of a philosophy of feeling and that of a completion of the meditation on ‘disproportion’ in the dimension of feeling. We must resolve these two questions together. (82–83)

The “locus and the node of disproportion” (91) is situated between sensuous desire and reason. This “between,” called θυμόϛ by Plato, “constitutes the human feeling par excellence” and allows for “an understanding of the whole of human fragility” (92). Ricoeur’s “working hypothesis” presented right at the beginning of his essay (1–6) is then summarized later in the following statement: “Man’s humanity is the discrepancy in levels, that initial polarity, that divergence of affective tension between the extremities of which is placed the ‘heart’ ” (92).

According to Ricoeur ([1960] 1986, xliv), human disproportion or discord is to be understood as “the polarity within the human being of the finite and the infinite. … Human specific weakness and essential fallibility are ultimately sought within this structure of mediation between the pole of finitude and the pole of infinitude.” The “global character” of human disproportion plays a central role in Ricoeur’s “attempt at totalization” of the various facets of finitude. Thereby one should keep in mind that totality is not just the addition of “everything human—ideas, beliefs, values, signs, works, tools, institutions” (67). Yet the question remains: “How should I pass from the idea of a sum to that of a whole? Man’s function, insofar as it is distinct from the sum of his partial intentions, would elude me if I could not connect the movement of the whole to the very project of reason, which is that in me which demands the totality” (66). This does not mean that the idea of totality would be “merely a rule for theoretical thought. It dwells in the human will and in this way becomes the source of the most extreme ‘disproportion’: that which preys on human action and strains it between the finitude of character and the infinitude of happiness” (67).

Finitude is “my point of view” (Ricoeur [1960] 1986, 20–21). The overall relevance of “finite perspective” as a theme (61) in Ricoeur’s approach leads to the relation of human finitude and limitation up to the point of deducing finitude from the limited point of view taken naturally. Walter J. Lowe pointedly describes Ricoeur’s “regressive analysis” (21) or “regressive route” (23) in his introduction to Fallible Man by saying: “I do not know my finitude by a simple act of introspection, looking within myself. Rather I begin by noting that a given object presents only one side of itself: it is on this basis that I realize that I see things from a specific, limited point of view and am, in this sense, finite” (Lowe in Ricoeur [1960] 1986, xvi).

Human Being Is Finite

Dissociating himself from what Ricoeur ([1960] 1986, 6–15) calls “The Pathétique of ‘Misery,’ ” Ricoeur starts by analyzing the “Finite Perspective” (18–24) and the “Infinite Verb” (24–37), and he puts Descartes’s “theme of finite-infinite” at the basis of his analysis of human fallibility. By doing so, he dissociates himself from what he considers the contemporary tendency to make finitude “the global characteristic”—as he calls it—of human reality. He adds:

To be sure, none of the philosophers of finitude has a simple and non-dialectical concept of finitude; all of them speak in one sense or another of the transcendence of human being. Conversely, Descartes, having announced an ontology of the finite-infinite, continues to call the created human being finite with respect to the divine infinitude. Consequently it is unwarranted to exaggerate the difference between the philosophies of finitude and a philosophy that starts straightway with the paradox of finite-infinite human being. But the difference is not trivial even when it is reduced to one of accent or tone. The question is whether human transcendence is merely transcendence of finitude or whether the converse is not something of equal importance: as will be seen, human being appears to be no less discourse than perspective, no less a demand for totality than a limited nature, no less love than desire. The interpretation of the paradox beginning with finitude does not seem to us to have any privilege over the opposed interpretation. According to the latter, human being is infinitude, and finitude is a sign that points to the restricted nature of this infinitude; conversely, infinitude is a sign of the transcending of finitude. Human being is no less destined to unlimited rationality, to totality, and beatitude than limited to a perspective, consigned to death, and riveted to desire. Our working hypothesis concerning the paradox of the finite-infinite implies that we must speak of infinitude as much as of human finitude. The full recognition of this polarity is essential to the elaboration of the concepts of intermediacy, disproportion, and fallibility, the interconnections of which we have indicated in moving from the last to the first of these concepts (3–4),

that is, from human finitude to infinitude, from perspective, desire, limited nature and death, to discourse, demand for totality, love, and beatitude. For Ricoeur, planet Earth remains what it has been for so long: a place for corruption, limited movements and death, a place for great sublunar cemeteries, “the dark spot on the clear jacket of the sky” (Sloterdijk 1999, 420; my translation), which encourages at best a kind of private property on fascinating mysteries. Actually, it provides the humiliation of all human beings, compared to a supraterrestrial space practically out of reach for them.

Ricoeur’s promise of “unlimited rationality” to which human being “is no less destined” is indeed a meager consolation. No wonder he speaks in the conclusion of Fallible Man of “la tristesse du fini”—“the sadness of the finite” (Ricoeur [1960] 1986, 138–140). Sadness is for him an “excellent word” referring to “a negative lying deeper than all language” (140). Following Spinoza, Ricoeur defines sadness as “a passion by which the soul moves to a lesser perfection.” He adds:

Besides the sadness that expresses the intermittent character of my effort to exist, there is a ground of sadness that may be called the sadness of the finite. This sadness is nourished by all the primitive experiences that, to express themselves, have recourse to negation: lack, loss, dread, regret, deception, dispersion, and irrevocability of duration. Negation is so obviously mixed in with them that we can indeed hold this experience of finitude for one of the roots of negation. (139)

The analyses “proposed under the heading of pure description” (xli) in the first volume of Philosophy of Will were, as Ricoeur says in the “Preface” to Fallible Man, necessary to put Fault and the whole experience of human evil [in parentheses] so as to delimit the field of pure description. In thus bracketing the domain of fault, I sketched the neutral sphere of human being’s most fundamental possibilities, or, as it were, the undifferentiated keyboard upon which the guilty as well as the innocent human being might play. Straightway that purely descriptive neutrality endowed all the analyses with a deliberately chosen, abstract turn. The present work [namely Fallible Man] intends to do away with this purely descriptive abstraction by reintroducing what was bracketed. Now, to take away the abstraction, or to remove the parentheses, is not to draw the consequences or apply the conclusions of pure description. It is to disclose a new thematic structure that calls for new working hypotheses and a new method of approach (xli).

When in the conclusion of Fallible Man, Ricoeur—despite the firm intention to work out new hypotheses and a new method of approach—talks about “la tristesse du fini,” he indicates that he has left in no way the domain of the “pure description” of “the neutral sphere of human being’s most fundamental possibilities,” since such a description in the first volume of Philosophy of Will ends up also with reference to a threefold “tristesse” (translated as “sorrow”): “the sorrow of finitude” (447–448), which refers to “la tristesse du fini,” then “the sorrow of formlessness” (448–450) and “the sorrow of contingence,” (450–456) followed by a section on “experience of contingence and the idea of death” (456–463).

To a large extent, human finitude is taken for granted not only in the philosophy of religion, but also in Christian theology with the exception of the theology of creation that emphasizes the creature character of human being. And yet even there, Karl Rahner states,

one hates created reality because it is not that which is upon itself unconditioned. One calls it the relative, the contingent, that which is related to God and can thus be determined only negatively as mere limitation of the infinite being as such, which alone counts. And one forgets that precisely that conditioned reality is loved unconditionally by the unconditioned and has for that reason a relevance that makes out of it more than just a provisory reality vanishing before God; one forgets that the created unconditioned forbids us to appreciate it only negatively.1

Breaking the spell of totality and the magic of the infinite goes along with the breach of finitude qua limitation. To confuse finitude with limitation may indeed be well intentioned. However, to break with such a confusion brings human being back to transcendence as one’s proper enabling (Stambaugh 1992, 11), according to which limitation consists precisely in having no limitation. A self-proclaimed finitude breaks with limitation and not transcendence as such. Human being is finite. Human finitude is kept alert—not in check—through transcendence; human finitude is the casket (écrin)—not the screen (écran)—of transcendence. The illusion that is ours pertains less to the true import of knowledge than to the tendency to reify knowledge and to forget that the forms of thinking go further than what is just “given.” To read divine transcendence into human finitude reminds us that a god who does not become human only enjoys at best a transcendence akin to the transcendence of ideas; it reminds us also that the important thing consists in knowing what one says, which is less obvious than one may believe, especially when—as Ricoeur ([1960] 1986) does—“a vague, formless transcendence” is chastised because it would be viewed only as “a simple field of appearance,” not as “an intelligible order” (44) under “a totalizing consideration” (48) for which finitude can only be limitation.

Finitude and Freedom

Ricoeur takes as the starting point of his reflection on human fallibility what he calls “the conditions of possibility of the objectivity of the thing” ([1960] 1986, 47). He readily acknowledges that the “nexus of things especially lacks the presence of persons with whom we work, fight, and communicate, and who stand forth on the horizon of things, on the setting of pragmatic and valorized objects, as other poles of subjectivity, apprehension, valorization, and action” (47–48). And yet he suggests a “striking resemblance” between the “synthesis” of reason and existence (72)—or reason and finitude (74)—that the person is on the one hand, and the synthesis of the object (72) is on the other hand, with the only difference that the synthesis in which the form of the person is constituted is deemed “fragile,” whereas the synthesis in which the thing’s form is constituted is deemed “hidden” (79). However, the possibility of the synthesis in the object “is in no way an experience capable of being dramatized; the consciousness of whose province it belongs is by no means self-consciousness, but the formal unity of the object, a project of the world” (106–107). According to Ricoeur, “most often we treat ourselves as objects. Working and social life require this objectification; our very freedom depends on these social regularities which give us a routine existence” (101).

“[I]nasmuch as the most important obstacles and dangers of life come from intersubjective reality,” “the insertion of another person among the consumable objects toward which the sensible appetite is directed constitutes a turn that is singularly more decisive than the insertion of an obstacle and danger between desire and pleasure, or between repulsion and pain” (Ricoeur [1960] 1986, 109). “The encountering of another person is what breaks the finite, cyclic pattern of the sensible appetite” (111). “In imagining another state of affairs or another kingdom, I perceive the possible, and in the possible, the essential. The understanding of a passion as bad requires the understanding of the primordial by the imagination of another empirical modality, by exemplification in an innocent kingdom” (112). Ricoeur lets himself “be guided by the constitution of objectivity for which feeling is the counterpart through interiorization” (122) with regard to what he calls “the context of having” (114–116), “the context of power” (116–120), and “the quest for esteem” and “reciprocity” (120–124).

Having:

Mine and yours, by mutually excluding each other, differentiate the I and the you through their spheres of belonging. Strictly speaking, the multiplicity of subjects is not a numerical multiplicity. Each ego retains a fringe of spiritual indifferentiation which makes communication possible and which makes the other my like. But the mutual exclusion, begun by the body insofar as it is a separate and occupied spatiality, is continued by mutual expropriation; the attachment of the body changes character through the interference of the attachment to the “mine.” If I hold to my house because of my body, the relation to my body becomes, in turn, dependent on the economic relation to things that nourish it, clothe it, and protect it. Being established and settled completes incarnation and transforms it through and through. Moreover, the relation of appropriation invades the region of the mind step by step: I can be in a relation of appropriation with my thoughts (I have my ideas about that, I say). Straightway the mutual expropriation moves from the body to the mind and carries to completion even into their very inwardness the breach between the I and the you. (Ricoeur [1960] 1986, 114–115)

However, Ricoeur continues:

… it should be possible to draw a dividing line that cuts not between being and having, but between unjust having and a just possession that would distinguish among human beings without mutually excluding them. And even if all innocence had to be denied to private appropriation, the relation between human being and having would still be reaffirmed on the level of a “We.” Through the mediation of the “we” and the “our,” the “I” would again join itself to a “mine.” Thus, imaginative variation encounters a limit that bears witness to the resistance of an essence: I cannot imagine the I without the mine, or human being without having. (Ricoeur [1960] 1986, 115)

Power:

… I could not understand power as evil if I could not imagine an innocent destination of power by comparison to which it is Fallen. I can conceive of an authority which would propose to educate the individual to freedom, which would be a power without violence; in short, I can imagine the difference between power and violence; the utopia of a Kingdom of God, a City of God, an empire of minds or a kingdom of ends, implies such an imagination of non-violent power. This imagination liberates the essence; and this essence governs all efforts to transform power into an education to freedom. Through this highly meaningful goal I “endow” history, in fact, with a meaning. (Ricoeur [1960] 1986, 120)

Esteem and Reciprocity:

The quest for reciprocity … is not satisfied by the interhuman relations in the context of having, which are relations of mutual exclusions, nor by the relation in the context of power, which are asymmetrical, hierarchical relations, and therefore non-reciprocal ones. This is why the constitution of the Self is pursued beyond the economic and political spheres in the realm of interpersonal relations. It is there that I pursue the aim of being esteemed, approved, and recognized. My existence for myself is dependent on this constitution in another’s opinion. … Up to now we have made it our policy to let ourselves be guided by the constitution of objectivity for which feeling is the counterpart through interiorization. What is the objectivity here that follows up the objectivity of economic ‘goods’ in the quest for having and the objectivity of political institutions in the quest for power? It seems that there is no longer any objectivity at all. (Ricoeur [1960] 1986, 121–122)

Here, Ricoeur adopts what he calls “a reflection of a Kantian style”—as follows:

… esteem involves a representation, the representation of an end that is not merely an “end to be realized,” but an “end existing by itself.” The person as represented is just this. Now, this representation has a status of objectivity insofar as the worth of this end is not merely for us, but in itself. The opposition between the representation of an end in itself and that of a means for us is of itself constitutive of a dimension of objectivity. Not to be able to utilize another person is to encounter objectivity as a limit of my arbitrariness. Objectivity consists in that I cannot use another merely as a means, nor utilize persons like things. … Kant gives the name of humanity to this objectivity. The proper object of esteem is the idea of human being in my person and in the person of another. I expect another person to convey the image of my humanity to me, to esteem me by making my humanity known to me. This fragile reflection of myself in another’s opinion has the consistency of an object; it conceals the objectivity of an existing end that draws a limit to any pretension to make use of me. It is in and through this objectivity that I can be recognized. … Cultural objectivity is the very relation of human beings to human beings represented in the idea of humanity; only cultural testimonies endow it with the density of things, in the form of monuments existing in the world: but these things are “works.” It is this formal and material objectivity of the idea of human being that engenders an affectivity to its measure: the cycle of the feelings of esteem. … Because the relation to self is an interiorized relation to another, opinion and belief are the core of it; worth is neither seen nor known but believed. I believe that I am worth something in the eyes of another who approves my existence; in the extreme case, this other is myself. Insofar as I am affected by it, this belief, this credence, this trust, constitutes the very feeling of my worth. … Nothing is more fragile, nothing is easier to wound than an existence that is at the mercy of a belief; and one can understand how the “feeling of inferiority” could serve as a clue to the genesis of neuroses. (Ricoeur [1960] 1986, 122–125; emphasis mine)

According to Ricoeur, feelings not ruled by the belonging to “Ideas” or the belonging to a “We”

… are essentially formless, moods, Stimmungen, or, as someone has termed them, atmospheric feelings. … It might be said that the unconditioned, which is thought but not known by means of objective determinations, is experienced in a modality of feeling that is equally formless. If being is “beyond essence,” if it is horizon, it is understandable that feelings that most radically interiorize the supreme intention of reason might themselves be beyond form. “Moods” alone can manifest the coincidence of the transcendent, in accordance with intellectual determinations, and the inward, in accordance with the order of existential movement. The height of the feeling of belonging to being ought to be the feeling in which what is most detached from our vital depth—what is absolute, in the strong sense of the word—becomes the heart of our heart. But then one cannot name it; one can merely call it the Unconditioned that is demanded by the reason and whose inwardness is manifested by feeling. (Ricoeur [1960] 1986, 105–106)

Let us conclude these long quotations with the following words. For Ricoeur, “Human being is the Joy of Yes in the sadness of the finite” (1986, 140). “If the human being is capable of Joy, of Joy in and through anguish, [then] that is the radical principle of all ‘disproportion’ in the dimension of feeling and the source of human being’s affective fragility” (106). “With feeling, the polemical duality of subjectivity replies to the solid synthesis of objectivity” (107). “The object is synthesis; the self is conflict” (126).

Except on pages 101 and 120, quoted above, there are but a few allusions to freedom in Fallible Man. At the end of the Preface, Ricoeur refers to the “grandeur” and the “limitation” of what he calls “an ethical vision of the world.” In such a vision—and this is its “grandeur”—“not only is it true that freedom is the ground of evil, but the avowal of evil is also the condition of the consciousness of freedom. For in this avowal one can detect the delicate connection of the past and the future, of the self and its acts, of non-being and pure action in the very core of freedom” ([1960] 1986, xlix). As to its “limitation,” it is “already signified in the ambiguous structure of the myth of the fall: by positing evil, freedom is the victim of an Other” (xlix). In chapter 2, on “the transcendental synthesis” (17–45), the summary of the argumentation at the end of the section on “Infinite verb” (24–37) includes the following considerations:

The transcendence of speech centered upon the verb, and the verb revealed its soul of affirmation. In moving the accent from signification in general (which was understood rather in the sense of “noun”) onto the verb, we move it also from the truth-intention to the freedom-intention. Here again the correlation between assent and a specific moment of speech prevents the separation of the two problematics of truth and freedom. The verb supra-signifies: that means that it signifies primarily as a noun and is built on the primary intention of signifying. Thereby our freedom of affirming—insofar as it is tied to the verb—is rooted in the soil of noun-meanings. Moreover, … the verb binds human affirmation to the truth-intention in a twofold way. The verb considered as a declaration of being is the reference to the present time, and the reference to the subject is the verb as relational. The two dimensions of truth, existential and relational, are thus implied in the verb. Accordingly, if freedom of judgment lies in the act of affirmation, if the intentional correlate of affirmation is the verb, and if the verb aims at the truth, then freedom and truth form the noesis-noema pair [see Husserl] that is constitutive of human affirmation. ([1960] 1986, 36–37)

These are the only explicit references to freedom in Fallible Man. Is it so because human finitude is understood by Ricoeur as limitation? Let us examine this issue by referring to the usual approach to human rights and freedom still inspired by the 1789 Declaration of human rights, article 4.

You have rights—others also do! You are free—others also are! The rights of others can interfere with my own rights and make their implementation more difficult and potentially impossible to achieve. The freedom of others is usually seen as a limitation of, and as a virtual and even real threat to, my own freedom. Considering others as threat goes along with individualism, subjectivism and instrumentality, and ultimately a loss of freedom. Not to be taken for granted, let alone to be just defended or even imposed, my own freedom is enabled only through my actual engaging in the realization of the freedom of others. The latter is not a limitation; it is not a virtual threat to my own freedom; it is its condition of possibility. I can be free only if I care for the freedom of others. Freedom emerges from the core of finitude itself. The mutual conditioning of personal freedom goes not from finitude as limitation (dependency) to the infinite, but from finitude to otherness.

Conclusion

The philosophy of religion helps to understand why speaking is frightening because never enough is being said, even though what is said is always too much. To know why one says “finitude” is to know why one no longer wishes to put the emphasis on “infinite”—according to Ricoeur ([1960] 1986, 12), a word “more expressive than meaningful”—on “absolute,” “limitation,” “immanence,” “fallibility,” or “fragility.” The issue does not consist in merely incorporating the term “finitude” into one’s vocabulary while keeping the mindset intact or untouched; rather, it is to put into question one’s own habits of thinking. To say that human being is so finite that one no longer knows what human being is—this is really to say nothing at all. This is so because human finitude—like meaning—is not a theme of understanding, but the condition of possibility of being human. I need to understand human finitude otherwise than as limitation and together with transcendence in order to understand transcendence otherwise than as mere super-imposition.

Nowadays, philosophy allegedly reaches the peak of its art when it makes plain how to word things in case it would have something to say. Referring to finitude in direct relation to transcendence means that we are condemned, as it were, to creativity, namely, to inquire into what remains to be done when nothing can be said. This is both the necessary and impossible task of religious thought. Creative people are those who prevent themselves from sinking into noxious routine. Even the absence of creativity has to be thought of in view of a new intimacy with what is deemed obvious.

Only a finite being can be a transcendent being. This is a point of departure, perhaps even a new paradigm for philosophy of religion, not just a matter of choosing a new accent or tone. In the movement from and return to this statement lies the hope that it is properly understood.

NOTE

1. Rahner quoted in Tremblay (1992, 319n37). One may add that human finitude is often practically ignored in the various approaches to the notion of revelation, with few exceptions, including Rahner (see Tremblay 1992).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aboulafia, Mitchell. 1982. “Finitude and Self-Overcoming.” Dialogos 17(39): 53–64.

Birault, Henri. 1960. “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude.” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 14: 135–162.

Borel, Alain. 1972. Hegel et le problème de la finitude. Paris: La Pensée Universelle.

Boutin, Maurice. 1974. Relationalität als Verstehensprinzip bei Rudolf Bultmann. Beiträge zur Evangelischen Theologie, no. 67. Munich: Chr. Kaiser.

———. 1980. “Aporie et temporalité: Remarques sur un cas limite, l’herméneutique de la conclusion chez Castelli.” In Esistenza, Mito, Ermeneutica: Scritti per Enrico Castelli, vol. 1, edited by Marco M. Olivetti, 419–444. Padua: CEDAM.

———. 1980. “Le texte biblique et la question du sens.” Laval Théologique et Philosophique 36(2): 139–171.

———. 1983. “L’Un dispersif: Examen d’une requête récente.” In Neo-platonismo e Religione, edited by Marco M. Olivetti, 253–279. Padua: CEDAM.

———. 1983. “Anonymous Christianity: A Paradigm for Interreligious Encounter?” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 20: 602–629.

———. 1986. “Autrui différé: Remarques sur la théorie de l’action de George Herbert Mead.” In Intersubjectività, Socialità, Religione, edited by Marco M. Olivetti, 725–739. Padua: CEDAM.

———. 1988. “Dieu et la projection non-objectivée: Conséquences de la compréhension de Dieu dans la théologie de Rudolf Bultmann.” Laval Théologique et Philosophique 44(2): 221–246.

———. 1990. “Méprises du langage, énigme du monde: À propos d’une expression étrange du Tractatus de Wittggenstein.” Journal Religiologiques 1(2): 37–49.

———. 1992. “Relation, Otherness, and the Philosophy of Religion.” The Journal of Religious Pluralism 2: 61–82.

———. 1994. “Conceiving the Invisible: Joseph C. McLelland’s Modal Approach to Theological and Religious Pluralism.” In The Three Loves: Philosophy, Theology, and World Religions: Essays in Honour of Joseph C. McLelland, edited by Robert C. Culley and William Klempa, 1–18. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press.

———. 1996. “L’inouï l’indécidablde selon Castelli et Derrida: Philosophie de la religion et critique du logocentrisme.” In Philosophy of Religion Between Ethics and Ontology, edited by Marco M. Olivetti, 815–829. Padua: CEDAM.

———. 2001. “Énigme du dire.” In Intersubjectivité et théologie philoso-phique, edited by Marco M. Olivetti, 431–438. Padua: CEDAM.

———. 2002. “Finitude et transcendance: Conditions d’un changement de paradigme.” In Théologie négative, edited by Marco M. Olivetti, 341–355. Padua: CEDAM.

———. 2003. “Truths & Texts: ‘Dead or Alive!’—Only (a) Text?” Journal ARC 31: 39–51.

———. 2004. “Le penser comme dette.” In Le don et la dette, edited by Marco M. Olivetti, 453–465. Padua: CEDAM.

———. 2005. “Effacing the Divine: Kai Nielsen’s Philosophical Achievements.” Journal ARC 33: 506–518.

———. 2005. “On A Quasi-Realm for Reflection: Richard Kearney’s The God Who May Be,” 18 p. (roneo). Paper AAR/EIR Conference, Panel 7/2 on “God after Metaphysics: Discussing Kearney,” May 7, Montreal.

———. 2007. “The Current State of the Individual: A Meditation on ‘The Falling Man,’ a Photo Taken by Richard Drew.” Toronto Journal of Theology 23(2): 173–182.

———. 2008. “Virtualité et identité: L’identité narrative selon Paul Ricoeur, et ses apories.” Études Théologiques et Religieuses 83(3): 367–376.

Cambron, Micheline, ed. 2013. L’héritage littéraire de Paul Ricoeur: Postures d’héritiers. Actes de colloques du site Fabula. Paris: Fabula.org/

Dastur, Françoise. 2013. “Je ne pense pas que la philosophie puisse devenir populaire.” Philosophie magazine 72: 70–75.

Dillon, M.-C. 1977. “Human Finitude and the Limits of Reason: A Phenomenological Approach to the Question of Irrationality.” Journal of the British Society of Phenomenology 8(2): 94–102.

Emad, Parvis. 1985. “World, Finitude, and Solitude as Basic Concepts of Meta-physics.” Research in Phenomenology 15: 247–258.

Farrer, Austin. 1959. Finite and Infinite: A Philosophical Essay. London: Westminster Press.

Fetscher, Irving. 1975. “Vivre dans la finitude.” Concilium 105: 79–92.

Fontan, Pierre. 1969. “Approches du fini.” Revue Thomiste 69: 25–58; 570–588.

Fulton, J. 1981. “Experience, Alienation and the Anthropological Condition of Religion.” The Annual Review of the Social Sciences of Religion 5: 1–32.

Gefen, Alexandre. 2013. “Paul Ricoeur; ou les livres intérieurs.” Le Magazine Littéraire 532: 8–12.

Heidegger, Martin. 1995. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Hohler, T.-P. 1976. “Fichte and the Problem of Finitude.” Southwestern Journal of Philosophy 7(3): 103–112.

Lamblin, Robert. 1977. Raison absolue et finitude: Pour une critique de la raison pure philosophique. Paris: Vrin.

Laruelle, François. 1981. “Réflexion sur le sens de la finitude dans la ‘Critique de la raison pure.’ ” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 35: 269–283.

———. 1986. Les philosophies de la différence. Paris: PUF.

Ledure, Yves. 1989. Transcendances: Essai sur Dieu et le corps. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer.

———. 2010. La rupture: Christianisme et modernité. Paris: Lethielleux.

Lucash, Frank. 1982. “On the Finite and Infinite in Spinoza.” Southwestern Journal of Philosophy 13(1): 61–73.

Mahlman, Th.R., and R. Romberg. 1972. “Endlich.” In Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 2, edited by Joachim Ritter, 481–489. Darmstadt: Wissenschaft-liche Buchgesellschaft.

Raeymaeker, Louis de. 1932. “La structure métaphysique de l’être fini.” Revue Néo-scolastique de Philosophie 34: 187–217.

Ricoeur, Paul. (1950) 1966. Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary. Translated and with an introduction by Erazim V. Kohak. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

———. (1960) 1986. Fallible Man. Translated by Charles A. Kelbley and with an introduction by Walter J. Lowe. New York: Fordham University Press.

Sallis, John. 1965. “World, Finitude, Temporality in the Philosophy of M. Heidegger.” Philosophy Today 9: 40–52.

Sloterdijk, Peter. 1999. Sphären II: Makrosphärologie—Globen. Frankfurt-Main: Suhrkamp.

———. 2004. “Foreword to the Theory of Spheres: An Interview by Jean-Christophe Royoux.” October 16, Vienna. Accessed February 6, 2013. http://www.sed.manchester.ac.uk/research/marc/news/seminars/latour/COSMOGRAM-INTER-GB_Spheres.pdf (site discontinued).

Stambaugh, Joan. 1974. “Time, Finitude and Finality.” Philosophy East and West 24(2): 129–135.

———. 1992. The Finitude of Being. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Taminiaux, Jacques. 1971. “Finitude et absolu: Remarques sur Hegel et Heidegger, interprètes de Kant.” Revue Philosophique de Louvain 69: 190–215.

Tauxe, Henri-Charles. 1971. La notion de finitude dans la philosophie de Martin Heidegger. Lausanne: Éditions L’Âge d’Homme.

Tremblay, Jacynthe. 1992. Finitude et devenir: Fondements philosophiques du concept de révélation chez Karl Rahner. Series Héritage et Projet, no. 47. Montréal: Fides.