REVIEWS alism or class. Although he stresses that class and regional boundaries are social and conceptual, rather than “essential” or natural, he also implies that the cognitive efficacy of assertions of group identity depend on some precog- nitive “groupness” that is both conceptual and culturally /economically “real” (224). When he talks about class or ethnic group resistance to domination, he seems to suggest that it involves the articulation of some latent essential group identity that has been silenced by the dominant discourse. For exam- ple, he cites the case of a minority language (Béarnais) that has achieved symbolic, official power by being used in the formal public domain from which it had been excluded as a “patois” (68). The problem is that the effi- cacy of such a symbolic assertion is not entirely predictable, because the whole issue of minority identity is problematic and ambiguous. The Béar- nais (or other French minorities like the Bretons or the Corsicans) are not just Béarnais (or Breton, or Corsican); they are also French. Their experi- ence of “Frenchness” is no less authentic or persistent than their experience of “regionainess.” Thus the Béarnais crowd that hears a speech in Béarnais may, to use Bourdieu’s terms, collude with the dominant and refuse to ac- cept the validity of their language’s public use. Bourdieu’s theoretical framework perhaps demands that the experiential and social relevance of such categories be examined in particular, situated contexts, rather than be taken for granted. This is in fact consistent with his assertion that the science of classification must be the science of the strug- gle over classifications. What is missing in Bourdieu’s account of this struggle is that there are not always unambiguous wins and losses. Reviewed by ALEXANDRA M. JAFFE Department of Sociology/Anthropology ‘State University of New York (Received 10 July 1993) Cortland, NY 13045 Paut Ricogur, From text to action: Essays in hermeneutics, IT. Kathleen Blamey & John B. Thompson (trans.). Evanston: Northwestern Univer- sity Press, 1991. Pp. xvi + 346. $42.95 (pap. $17.95). Although he is most widely known for his contribution to the theory and practice of interpretation, Ricoeur began his philosophical career with a more Kantian interest in the rationality of the will, or what Kant called practical reason. The documents of that period are the published volumes of his pro- jected three-volume philosophy of will. That project began with a study of the voluntary and involuntary aspects of the will. It moved from there to a discussion of fallibility (Fallible man), which puts into philosophical concepts the meaning of what is prephilosophically understood in the pathéthique and rhetoric of misery, and of fallenness (The Symbolism of evil), which 157REVIEWS similarly interprets the meaning of the symbols of fall by putting it into philosophical concepts. This latter volume also represents the way in which, toward the end of the 1960s, Ricoeur’s attention is diverted from a pure phe- nomenological investigation to a hermeneutical phenomenology. The reason for the diversion is Ricoeur’s recognition that, contrary to Fichte and Hus- serl, self-understanding cannot be based on the idea that the self is completely transparent to itself in its own intentions and acts. That implicit principle of idealist phenomenology is what both Freud and hermeneutical theory have dislodged. The route to self-understanding is, rather, the indirect one lead- ing through the interpretation of signs, symbols, and texts. As the title of the present volume suggests and as the essays in it demon- strate, Ricoeur did not give up the interest in practical reason while pursu- ing the more specifically hermeneutical questions. Instead, through the hermeneutical analyses, he took up the matter of practical reason in another way. The problem of practical reason, posed in the context of Kant’s cri- tiques of reason, turns out to be that of ascertaining how the imagination functions in making rational action possible. Imagination as such mediates between the universal and the particular. In its theoretical exercise, the one that Kant most clearly explicates, it performs this mediation by virtue of its “mimetic” capacity; that is, through the transcendental images it makes of the real objects that it can conceive only abstractly and intuit (or observe) only concretely. Kant provides as an example of this capacity the image our mind makes of a dog-in-general, which is not a replica of any real dog but an imitation of it in which the general and abstract features contained in the concept of a dog are united with the individual and concrete features con- tained in the sense-perception of any real dog. The imagination thus performs a theoretical mediation between the opposite elements of the known object (abstract and concrete, general and individual). How does the imagination perform this function with regard to action, or praxis? If in its theoretical function it unites concept and percept in a transcendental image, how does it perform a practical mediation? Ricoeur’s answer, which is indicated in the title From text to action, can be briefly stated. The imagination, through its work in creating fiction, first severs all connection with the real world; but it does so in order to rejoin re- ality at a deeper level of the real. This answer is developed in the 15 essays brought together here, particularly in those of Part 2. Eight of the 15 have been previously published in English (seven of them as translations from French) between 1971 and 1983; the remaining ones are published here for the first time in English. They are thematically divided into three parts, en- titled For a Hermeneutical Phenomenology, From the Hermeneutics of Texts to the Hermeneutics of Action, and Ideology, Utopia, and Politics. The says included in Part 1 provide a justification of hermeneutics both within and against phenomenology. It is within phenomenology because, like all 158REVIEWS phenomenology, Ricoeur’s philosophy locates itself in the subject, like the Cartesian and Husserlian philosophy in the tradition that Ricoeur represents; it is against phenomenology because it rejects the idea that the self can be perfectly transparent to itself - or that, in other words, self-understanding can be achieved by reflection on the self by the self - and replaces it by the aim of arriving at self-understanding through the interpretation of signs, symbols, and texts. The essays in Part 2 of the present volume amount to an elaboration of the way in which fiction, by first severing the imagination from positive ex- istence, rejoins reality through the imaginative “icon” which, as a “graph- ism,” is connected with reality by recreating it, through writing, at another level of realism. This elaboration is, in essence, Ricoeur’s hermeneutics. The essays in Part 3 extend what is achieved at the level of an individual subject to questions of social and political construction. They take up basic questions related to the socializing of this mediating work of the imagina- tion, including the problems of ideology and its critique. To the extent that a collection of essays can perform the same role as a systematic presentation, From text to action contains the concluding part of Ricoeur’s philosophy of the will. For purposes of this review, we can reduce the manifold questions in- volved to this one: How does imagination mediate action? Ricoeur’s answer is that the imagination does so by fictional creations. Fiction first severs the connection to positive reality. Fictional characters, plots, and events are not “real” in the way that physical objects and events are real. Indeed, it lies in the nature of the fictional work that it neither intends to make, nor does it make, any reference to positive existence. Nothing about the characters in a novel or the events portrayed there is invalidated by the absence of any corresponding “real” persons or events. But the connection to reality, which is thus initially severed by the fictional character of the work, is reinstated at another level. Then a juncture is made through the imaginative “icon” - which, as a “graphism,” recreates reality “at a higher level of realism” (174) - and the “emplotment” (sythos), which gives the fictional work a temporal structure (3-4). Mimetic action is, however, not yet praxis; and if the fictional imagination were exhausted by its mimetic capacity (its capacity to rejoin reality through a redescription), it would not provide the power to act. Hence Ricoeur must also show how imagination is not only mimetic but also projective; it can project realities that are to be, and actions that are to be done, as well as it can imitate the reality that is and the actions that have been done. In this pro- jective work, the imagination engages in a kind of “free play” with respect to what “I can” do in view of what is projected. “There is thus,” as Ricoeur summarizes it, “a progression starting from the simple schematization of my projects, leading through the figurability of my desires, and ending in the 159REVIEWS imaginative variations of ‘I can.” This progression points toward the idea of imagination as the general function of developing practical possibilities” (178). Although Ricoeur has, in these essays, expanded the conception of intel- ligibility from that of predication (and logical structure) to that of emplot- ment (and narrative structure) and has shown the way in which imagination mediates practical action as well as theoretical judgment, students of his thought will notice an element still missing. It is the element Ricoeur ex- pressed in an adaptation of a Heideggerian phrasing: the symbol donne a penser ~ a symbol presents to thought the reality that it means. In that sense, a symbol enables thought. Is there an equivalent for practical reason? Does the redescription of reality accomplished by fiction also enable action, by providing the motivation, in addition to providing a new world in which to act? The question has to remain unanswered for the time being. Ricoeur’s works have always combined a precision of thought, represented by philosophy at its best, with a certain literary elegance. These essays are no exception, and the translators have been able to preserve both qualities in this publication. Reviewed by Ronen P. SCHARLEMANN Department of Religious Studies University of Virginia (Received 14 Tuly 1992) Chariouesville, VA 23903 160