Pub Date : 2021-06-21DOI: 10.1515/9783110725049-008
A first round of explorations into the technicity of action has now been completed. In Chapter 1, the appropriateness of a hermeneutic approach to this aspect of action has been defended. At the same time, I demonstrated the presence of technicity in the heart of the human interaction of the emission, transmission and interpretation of meaning, in other words, in the efficacy of symbols. In Chapter 2, I examined the technicity of action as a feature of human existence, over the whole span of human civilizations and with all the variation and cultural specificity that capabilities and means may have at any specific place and time. The interplay between capabilities and means has been studied as a dimension of the understanding interaction that people have with their world. Through an exploration of the interrelation of capabilities and incapabilities in Chapter 3, it was possible to get a grip on the contingency and uncertainty of action as action. Chapter 4 expanded this view on the technicity of agency by considering the technicity of organized action: the agency of individuals in organizations and of collectives as organizations. Again, the interrelation of capabilities and incapabilities provided a view on the way adverbial increments of action vary as action plays out. Finally, aspects of the broader social theoretic framework of the previous chapters were studied in Chapter 5. The question of the teleological structure of action and the relation between agents and institutions has been clarified and its technical dimensions have been highlighted. Looking back over the five chapters in this way, one observes the major thrust as descriptive, clarifying and detailing. Still, each time this descriptive work opened up a view on the stakes involved in the respective views on the technicity of action. If symbols have efficacy, as I argued in Chapter 1, this calls for vigilance regarding the use people make of them, the power relations symbolic efficacy draws from, maintains or creates. Hence the question of social asymmetries, and in particular those depending on symbolic violence. Chapter 2 showed how people’s self-understanding is influenced by the technical dimension of interaction and how people come to play social roles that are technical acquisitions, as much as normative constructions. But such roles, and the ideals they embody, may also be imposed on people (for example, under degrading and exploitative working conditions from which some people cannot escape). Furthermore, the politics of debate about the improvement of people’s fate or about the values to be enforced by technical means is itself co-constituted by
{"title":"Intermediate Reflection: Tools for Critique","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/9783110725049-008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110725049-008","url":null,"abstract":"A first round of explorations into the technicity of action has now been completed. In Chapter 1, the appropriateness of a hermeneutic approach to this aspect of action has been defended. At the same time, I demonstrated the presence of technicity in the heart of the human interaction of the emission, transmission and interpretation of meaning, in other words, in the efficacy of symbols. In Chapter 2, I examined the technicity of action as a feature of human existence, over the whole span of human civilizations and with all the variation and cultural specificity that capabilities and means may have at any specific place and time. The interplay between capabilities and means has been studied as a dimension of the understanding interaction that people have with their world. Through an exploration of the interrelation of capabilities and incapabilities in Chapter 3, it was possible to get a grip on the contingency and uncertainty of action as action. Chapter 4 expanded this view on the technicity of agency by considering the technicity of organized action: the agency of individuals in organizations and of collectives as organizations. Again, the interrelation of capabilities and incapabilities provided a view on the way adverbial increments of action vary as action plays out. Finally, aspects of the broader social theoretic framework of the previous chapters were studied in Chapter 5. The question of the teleological structure of action and the relation between agents and institutions has been clarified and its technical dimensions have been highlighted. Looking back over the five chapters in this way, one observes the major thrust as descriptive, clarifying and detailing. Still, each time this descriptive work opened up a view on the stakes involved in the respective views on the technicity of action. If symbols have efficacy, as I argued in Chapter 1, this calls for vigilance regarding the use people make of them, the power relations symbolic efficacy draws from, maintains or creates. Hence the question of social asymmetries, and in particular those depending on symbolic violence. Chapter 2 showed how people’s self-understanding is influenced by the technical dimension of interaction and how people come to play social roles that are technical acquisitions, as much as normative constructions. But such roles, and the ideals they embody, may also be imposed on people (for example, under degrading and exploitative working conditions from which some people cannot escape). Furthermore, the politics of debate about the improvement of people’s fate or about the values to be enforced by technical means is itself co-constituted by","PeriodicalId":281983,"journal":{"name":"Between Daily Routine and Violent Protest","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122367673","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-06-21DOI: 10.1515/9783110725049-011
[S]trengthened by analysis and description, we must stand ready for unprecedented forms of action that will alternate in a complex strategy the phases of negotiation and consultation and the phases of disruption and open conflict; this very difficult game requires that we have overcome the old schematizations crystallized around the words reform and revolution. Paul Ricœur, “Le conflit: signe de contradiction ou d’unité?”1
[5]在分析和描述的基础上，我们必须做好准备，采取前所未有的行动形式，在复杂的战略中，谈判和协商的阶段与破坏和公开冲突的阶段交替进行;这个非常困难的游戏要求我们克服围绕改革和革命这两个词的旧图式。Paul Ricœur，“Le conflict: sign de矛盾ou d ' unity ?”“1
{"title":"Chapter 8: Justice Despite Institutions. Struggling for a Good Life from the Destitute Edge of Society","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/9783110725049-011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110725049-011","url":null,"abstract":"[S]trengthened by analysis and description, we must stand ready for unprecedented forms of action that will alternate in a complex strategy the phases of negotiation and consultation and the phases of disruption and open conflict; this very difficult game requires that we have overcome the old schematizations crystallized around the words reform and revolution. Paul Ricœur, “Le conflit: signe de contradiction ou d’unité?”1","PeriodicalId":281983,"journal":{"name":"Between Daily Routine and Violent Protest","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123609502","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-06-21DOI: 10.1515/9783110725049-005
In the first chapter, I demonstrated the affinity of philosophical hermeneutics to questions related to the human ability to act, and the means by which humans act. Anyone who wants to understand the transmission of ideas will, sooner or later, have to study the efficacy of symbols, which depends on the technicity of those who articulate meaning, those who inscribe it and those who receive it. The second chapter considered how, throughout the history of the species, human beings have attempted to intervene in what human beings are, or could become, by means of a narrative reconfiguration of their lived existence. We saw that, intentionally or not, the sphere of technical actions and systems of artefacts has a similar reconfiguring effect on human beings as agents. In this chapter, we zoom in on the agent, in other words, on human beings, from the perspective of what they are able to do, or do not succeed in doing. In Oneself as Another and much of Ricœur’s later work, he elaborates a hermeneutics of the self, or, as he puts it, the acting and suffering human. The notion of capability or “I can” receives a central place in this project, which is also called a hermeneutics of the capable human [l’homme capable]. In essence, this hermeneutics explores four central capabilities that are telescoped into each other: saying, doing, narrating and imputing action to oneself as good/bad, just/unjust, prudent/irresponsible. These capabilities belong to the agent in the first person (I or we), but they require activation in interaction with others – both in interaction with people in the sense of a physical presence (you) and institutional others (that is, the institutional mediation of it). In this chapter and the remaining chapters of this book, I repeatedly come back to this grid which plots the range of capabilities on the threefold activation (I – you – it). Nevertheless, although Ricœur explores a range of human capabilities, the notion of capability itself remains underdetermined from what one may call a “technical” angle. In this chapter I transform this lacuna in his hermeneutics into a task. My aim is to deploy something that is already present in his philosophy, but in the negative, or in the form of fragmentary thoughts, and to examine this aspect more fully. The hypothesis guiding this chapter is that the hermeneutics of human capabilities requires more detailed development of the technical dimension of capabilities, that is, a reflection on, first, the skills and, second, the means of the “I can”. This is thus a development of the hermeneutics of capabil-
{"title":"Chapter 3: Human Capabilities in the Light of Incapabilities","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/9783110725049-005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110725049-005","url":null,"abstract":"In the first chapter, I demonstrated the affinity of philosophical hermeneutics to questions related to the human ability to act, and the means by which humans act. Anyone who wants to understand the transmission of ideas will, sooner or later, have to study the efficacy of symbols, which depends on the technicity of those who articulate meaning, those who inscribe it and those who receive it. The second chapter considered how, throughout the history of the species, human beings have attempted to intervene in what human beings are, or could become, by means of a narrative reconfiguration of their lived existence. We saw that, intentionally or not, the sphere of technical actions and systems of artefacts has a similar reconfiguring effect on human beings as agents. In this chapter, we zoom in on the agent, in other words, on human beings, from the perspective of what they are able to do, or do not succeed in doing. In Oneself as Another and much of Ricœur’s later work, he elaborates a hermeneutics of the self, or, as he puts it, the acting and suffering human. The notion of capability or “I can” receives a central place in this project, which is also called a hermeneutics of the capable human [l’homme capable]. In essence, this hermeneutics explores four central capabilities that are telescoped into each other: saying, doing, narrating and imputing action to oneself as good/bad, just/unjust, prudent/irresponsible. These capabilities belong to the agent in the first person (I or we), but they require activation in interaction with others – both in interaction with people in the sense of a physical presence (you) and institutional others (that is, the institutional mediation of it). In this chapter and the remaining chapters of this book, I repeatedly come back to this grid which plots the range of capabilities on the threefold activation (I – you – it). Nevertheless, although Ricœur explores a range of human capabilities, the notion of capability itself remains underdetermined from what one may call a “technical” angle. In this chapter I transform this lacuna in his hermeneutics into a task. My aim is to deploy something that is already present in his philosophy, but in the negative, or in the form of fragmentary thoughts, and to examine this aspect more fully. The hypothesis guiding this chapter is that the hermeneutics of human capabilities requires more detailed development of the technical dimension of capabilities, that is, a reflection on, first, the skills and, second, the means of the “I can”. This is thus a development of the hermeneutics of capabil-","PeriodicalId":281983,"journal":{"name":"Between Daily Routine and Violent Protest","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132659204","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-06-21DOI: 10.1515/9783110725049-012
What is wisdom in practice (phronesis)? What does it mean to act responsibly? These questions concern us practically as we seek the best courses of action, but also as onlookers at what others do, or even as theoreticians. Often these questions accompany people silently throughout their lives; sometimes they boil up, precipitating an existential crisis. To varying degrees these questions are part of the constitutive ambiguities of action. Action is one with of the flow of life, but can, to some degree, be planned. Capabilities enable us to do things, but they confront us in a series of incapabilities. Instruments augment our ability to intervene in the world, but also increase the impact of unintended consequences. Ethical considerations inform our action, but acting in accordance with these values generates secondary effects that may contradict the initial values. Hence, efficacy is bound to ambiguity, and this does not leave us indifferent. In this book, I have not tried to dispel these perplexities of action – instead, I have attempted to grapple with them as part of the meaning of human action. Hermeneutics, in combination with insights from the social sciences, has helped me to do so, as I restricted my view to one dimension of action: its technicity. If there is something like prudent or responsible action, the preceding chapters have gone some way toward clarifying what constitutes the practical pursuit of it, while still leaving aside the question of the ethical values that should rightfully inform our action. Proceeding in this way, I have remained true to two significant lessons that can be learned from Paul Ricœur. The first is that the moment of distantiation from action allows us to examine it as meaningful, while assuming a spectator’s perspective. Thus, the more interpretative means of hermeneutics and the explanatory means of social theory1 enhance our understanding of action – explaining more helps us to understand better, according to Ricœur’s formula. But this is the case only because of what the second lesson teaches us: people
{"title":"An Integrated View of the Technicity of Action and the Question of Responsibility","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/9783110725049-012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110725049-012","url":null,"abstract":"What is wisdom in practice (phronesis)? What does it mean to act responsibly? These questions concern us practically as we seek the best courses of action, but also as onlookers at what others do, or even as theoreticians. Often these questions accompany people silently throughout their lives; sometimes they boil up, precipitating an existential crisis. To varying degrees these questions are part of the constitutive ambiguities of action. Action is one with of the flow of life, but can, to some degree, be planned. Capabilities enable us to do things, but they confront us in a series of incapabilities. Instruments augment our ability to intervene in the world, but also increase the impact of unintended consequences. Ethical considerations inform our action, but acting in accordance with these values generates secondary effects that may contradict the initial values. Hence, efficacy is bound to ambiguity, and this does not leave us indifferent. In this book, I have not tried to dispel these perplexities of action – instead, I have attempted to grapple with them as part of the meaning of human action. Hermeneutics, in combination with insights from the social sciences, has helped me to do so, as I restricted my view to one dimension of action: its technicity. If there is something like prudent or responsible action, the preceding chapters have gone some way toward clarifying what constitutes the practical pursuit of it, while still leaving aside the question of the ethical values that should rightfully inform our action. Proceeding in this way, I have remained true to two significant lessons that can be learned from Paul Ricœur. The first is that the moment of distantiation from action allows us to examine it as meaningful, while assuming a spectator’s perspective. Thus, the more interpretative means of hermeneutics and the explanatory means of social theory1 enhance our understanding of action – explaining more helps us to understand better, according to Ricœur’s formula. But this is the case only because of what the second lesson teaches us: people","PeriodicalId":281983,"journal":{"name":"Between Daily Routine and Violent Protest","volume":"164 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116547941","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-06-21DOI: 10.1515/9783110725049-009
{"title":"Chapter 6: Of What Is “Ricoeur” the Name? Or, Philosophising at the Edge","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/9783110725049-009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110725049-009","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":281983,"journal":{"name":"Between Daily Routine and Violent Protest","volume":"54 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124873425","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-06-21DOI: 10.1515/9783110725049-010
“The people shall govern!”1 These words encapsulate the principle of popular sovereignty and the essence of all democratic constitutions. They state what the people have by right; they do not describe a state of fact. If the people shall govern, they shall have the right to participate in the political life of society and to enjoy a reasonable share of its goods. And if these rights are not upheld, the people shall struggle to set this right: the people shall engage in public debate, they shall elect other representatives, they shall form new political parties, they shall strike, they shall expose abuses of power, etc. This is what democracy should be. However, in so many nominally democratic countries, this ideal is undermined from all sides: how can the people engage in public debate if the system of education does little to equip them with the means to formulate their views in public fora? How are the people to struggle if joblessness relegates them to the margins of irrelevance to social disputes, or when their normal living conditions are so precarious that the only struggle possible is that for their survival? Under such limiting situations, where democracy remains little more than a promise, to what kind of action may people justifiably take recourse? In this chapter, I entertain the question of acts of violence as a form of political competence. I do so with the intention of thinking about democracy with realism, not as a starry-eyed visionary. But I feel some trepidation at doing so. If philosophising is more than merely toying with ideas, one has to recognize immediately the double enormity of this question. It is intellectually enormous in the sense that one cannot cover here the entire range of manifestations of violence2 (not even if we include the extension of the discussion in Chapter 8). It
{"title":"Chapter 7: Acts of Violence as Political Competence? From Ricoeur to Mandela and Back","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/9783110725049-010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110725049-010","url":null,"abstract":"“The people shall govern!”1 These words encapsulate the principle of popular sovereignty and the essence of all democratic constitutions. They state what the people have by right; they do not describe a state of fact. If the people shall govern, they shall have the right to participate in the political life of society and to enjoy a reasonable share of its goods. And if these rights are not upheld, the people shall struggle to set this right: the people shall engage in public debate, they shall elect other representatives, they shall form new political parties, they shall strike, they shall expose abuses of power, etc. This is what democracy should be. However, in so many nominally democratic countries, this ideal is undermined from all sides: how can the people engage in public debate if the system of education does little to equip them with the means to formulate their views in public fora? How are the people to struggle if joblessness relegates them to the margins of irrelevance to social disputes, or when their normal living conditions are so precarious that the only struggle possible is that for their survival? Under such limiting situations, where democracy remains little more than a promise, to what kind of action may people justifiably take recourse? In this chapter, I entertain the question of acts of violence as a form of political competence. I do so with the intention of thinking about democracy with realism, not as a starry-eyed visionary. But I feel some trepidation at doing so. If philosophising is more than merely toying with ideas, one has to recognize immediately the double enormity of this question. It is intellectually enormous in the sense that one cannot cover here the entire range of manifestations of violence2 (not even if we include the extension of the discussion in Chapter 8). It","PeriodicalId":281983,"journal":{"name":"Between Daily Routine and Violent Protest","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129488688","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-06-21DOI: 10.1515/9783110725049-006
One of the main features of human life is the organization of interaction. Our social existence simply cannot be imagined without clubs, companies, religious communities, protest movements, schools, factories, administrations, hospitals, etc. It is thus quite evident that organized action has to form part of a study on human capabilities and the means by which people act. Before we go further, I need to explain why I speak about “organized action” from the outset.1 Using this term allows me to keep action central to my approach, so as to gain a view on the full variety of a specific aspect of action. On the one hand, organized action is a much more general phenomenon than actions within organizations such as bureaucracies or companies, which are formalised under the name “organization”. On the other hand, the varieties of organized action display a range of levels of formality, which is important to account for if one wants to understand what is “organizational” about them. Both of these points may be illustrated with the example of the “informal economy”2: its informality is also a version of organized action, albeit less structured than “organizations” in the narrower sense. While my approach remains a theorizing of action, I will not refrain from using the word “organizations”. This is not merely due to convention. Part of the discussion consists of advancing an action theoretical ontology of organizations – variations in the size and complexity of organizations can only be properly accounted for by studying them as extensions of organized action. This first approximation of organized action is required in order to demarcate the theme of the current survey. I defend two theses. The first is that organizations, as the outcome of and basis for organized action, have a specific agency, of which the ac-
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