A Rico-Aristo-Hegelianism

This is my particular philosophical blend this semester—a blend, that is, of Aristotle, Hegel, and Ricoeur. My first week of graduate studies at Duquesne University proved for the most part impressive and intriguing.

With respect to Hegel, we are studying for the semester his perhaps most important work, Phenomenology of Spirit, under the direction of the great Dr. Tom Rockmore, who may very well be the foremost Hegel scholar in America. He has assured us, in light of having been reading the Phenomenology since ’62 and having been through it no less than sixteen times, we will need more than twenty minutes to master the text, despite our contemporary “speed-reading era.” Indeed…! Rockmore has published a good number of books on Hegel and the whole Kantian and post-Kantian Idealist tradition. The subject-object relation is once again, following in the Idealist mold, put to scrutiny now by Hegel in relation to an analysis of conciousness (Geistes). But do objects really change? Pehaps only in consciousness.


Of Ricoeur, I will be going through, with Dr. Keyes, the second part of the second volume in his "philosophy of the will," The Symbolim of Evil, orignially published in the French as Finitude and Guilt, along with the first part of the second volume, Fallible Man. He continues his philosophy of the will in a more indirect fashion than in the two prequels. Whereas in Freedom and Nature, Ricoeur pursues an eidetic analysis of philosophical anthropology, and especially of the will, and in Fallible Man, he pursues what he considers an 'empirics of the will,' attempting to put the eidetic structure previous laid out within the context of existence and contingency, now, in Symolism of Evil, Ricoeur is more concerned with the direct human experience of our own fallibility and fault through a phenomenological description of defilement, sin, and guilt. And "What is experienced as defilement, as sin, as guilt, requires the mediation of a specific language, the language of symbols" (SOE, 161). The work is precisely his attempt to make the transition from fallibility to fault--from the more philosophically easy concept of a fallible will to the aporia contained within the paradoxical concept of a 'servile will,' that is, a will in bondage. In the second part of the book, he is concerned with how this innate human experience of fault has been the basis for the Myths of all ancient religions, and how the myths themselves were not the more etiological element, but the experience of fallibility and fault is the point of departure. For example, the biblical myth of the fall is not as primordial as the experience of the fall. This is also the case in Babylonian mythopoetic religion, Greek tragedy, and Platonic (or more accurately, neo-Platonic) Orphism.

And finally, I will be delving into Aristotle's De anima and his Parva Naturalia with Dr. Polansky. It is quite evident from only the first class, that I will be forced to reconcile with a different view of Aristotle than one filtered through Thomisitic eyes offered at Franciscan by especially Sanford and Lee. This is exciting, however, for it will challenge me to not interepret Aristotle as simply the ancient basis for Thomistic, or even general scholastic thought. Polansky recently finished a commentary on the De Anima which has already been sent to the publishers, so needless to say, this treatise is one fresh in his mind. Polansky is an incredibly impressive professor and thinker and will certainly prove to be beneficial to my crucial understanding of ancient thought.