Evil – What’s the Problem?

The Completeness of the Fault in Paul Ricoeur’s Philosophy of the Will

Introduction

Evil – what’s the problem? Why is philosophy concerned with evil? Because as philosophers, as persons, we are concerned with the question of freedom in our willing and what may open up or truncate that freedom in action. “As Nabert masterfully analyzed it, awareness of the fault opens the limits of my act and shows me an evil self at the roots of an evil act.”[1] An evil self? The root of an evil act that is not a “missing the mark?” This would seem to highlight a completeness of fault,[2] most specifically as my fault. It does not seem but, rather, is the case for Ricoeur that the fault is complete. This is his position throughout the works available of his project on human willing.[3] This position leads to his wager: if the fault is complete, then evil is to be understood through freedom as that which is committed by a freedom enslaved and darkened by itself – an experience which does not admit of direct interrogation, but, must, instead, be approached through symbolism. This could lead to quite a change in the manner in which philosophy concerns itself with evil.

But does Ricoeur succeed and remain constant in making the claim that the fault is complete? It does seem that in places scattered throughout the text his position regarding the completeness of the fault wavers. Part I is an explication of Ricoeur’s position; part II is specifically about Ricoeur’s wager and the use of symbolism; and both parts II and III will provide reflections and insights into what exactly this investigation reveals and entails for philosophical study of the will and evil. I hope this discussion leads the reader to a deeper understanding of what is at stake in the project on willing, and Ricoeur’s answer to “Evil – what’s the problem?”

Part I: The Fault

Freedom and Nature: the Voluntary and the Involuntary

Because the entire project (as Ricoeur then envisioned it) is laid out in the Introduction, as well as discussing the fault in order to bracket it for a time, there is a large amount of text in the Voluntary and the Involuntary regarding the fault. Here is, in fact, where the fault is very clearly defined, especially with regard to its complete scope. The fault perverts the fundamental relation – to values and the Transcendent and the self. A relation refers to the function of the structure, viz., to actual willing. It is a distortion which affects implementation, not the actual structure itself. This is why Ricoeur can discuss the structure as underlying all acts of willing, good or bad. The fault is not a simple lack or negation, but a limitation that the person chooses, a bondage to Nothing that skews the relations.

The bracketing of the fault for the whole of VI is a necessary one. Though the bracketing of the fault on the surface creates the impression that it is not complete, this bracketing makes understanding of the completeness of the fault possible. What this means shall be shown as the investigation progresses. The fault is bracketed in order to show that there is but one fundamental structure of human willing, and that structure is primordial, “metaphysically original” per the translator. It happens to a freedom, to a willing that is observable and will be discussed as such as soon as the eidetic investigation of the fundamental possibilities has been laid out.

The fault profoundly alters the intelligibility of the human person as a whole. A depiction of how a person ought to will is not the project of VI – only an investigation of the fundamental possibilities and the true infinite of freedom, without the false infinite of the passions. And so back to the project here: the fault is complete. It is not complete destruction of the structure as a structure, but as it is used, implemented in actual willing, posited. VI is not trying to look at innocence or innocent structures because guilt or innocence is in the person, and not the structure. “[I]t is not the lost paradise of innocence which we propose to describe, but the structures which are the fundamental possibilities offered equally to innocence and to the fault as a common keyboard of human nature on which mythical innocence and empirical guilt play in different ways.”[4] The corruption and chiaroscuro of the fault seizes the person, and not the structure because the fault happens to a freedom, not to a structure.

[A] fundamental nature subsists even within the most complete fault. The fault happens to freedom; the guilty will is a freedom in bondage and not a return to an animal or mineral nature from which freedom is absent. This is the price of the fault being a fault, that is to say, the fruit of freedom, object of remorse. It is I who makes myself a slave: I impose on myself the fault which deprives me of control over myself. … Man is not part free and part guilty; he is totally guilty, in the very heart of a total freedom as complete as the power to decide, to move, and to consent. If the fault were not complete, it would not be serious. … I am free and this freedom is unavailable.[5]

This is why the bracketing allows us to see the completeness of the fault; because it is in the implementation of the structure in actual human willing. If the fault were not bracketed, then it could be thought of as in the structure, and in a sense, then, one would not be responsible because one did not have a structure that could will correctly.

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[6]Fallible Man

Here we are still not completely unbracketing the fault inasmuch as we are not concerned with concrete manifestations of fault, but only with the constitutional weakness in the human person that makes evil possible. This is fallibility, and fallibility entails disproportionality which entails feeling.[7] Emotion was not a part of VI, but as was discussed above, the passions have their part in fallibility and fault.[8] Fallibility is “that which allows for the possibility of a “rift” in man, what enables him to “err,” become divided against himself and thereby to become the ‘flawed’ creature.”[9]

FM is not concerned with the ultimate origin of evil, but a description of where evil is to be found, and that is the person; “even if evil came to man from another source which contaminates him, this other source would still be accessible to us only through its relation to us, only through the state of temptation, aberration, or blindness whereby we would be affected. In all hypotheses, evil manifests itself in man’s humanity.”[10] The concept of fallibility: presupposed that pure reflection can reach a certain threshold of intelligibility where the possibility of evil appears inscribed in the innermost structure of human reality. The investigation is still at the level of pure reflection, still examining the characteristics of the person’s being. The investigation is widening from an eidetic analysis of the structure of willing to the beginning of the empirics of willing which involves more of the person than just the structure. The fault is an ontological characteristic of the person’s constitution. The hypotheses of FM are that pure reflection can reach a certain threshold of intelligibility with regard to the possibility of evil inscribed in the innermost structure of human reality (this is not necessarily to say of the human being nor of human willing, but of human reality), and that evil has entered the world through the person, i.e., through the person’s disproportion of herself to herself.

The person is the only reality that presents this unstable constitution of being greater and lesser than herself. The disproportion is between the selves of the individual, in the fact that I am in my actions, in my connections to the world and to others. I am this and yet …; I can stall, I can postpone with reflection, I can serve my passions rather than my responsibility, I can hesitate. “I hesitate precisely because the world is an ironic question: and you, what will you do?”[11] I do not move fluidly, dancing through the world at one with what I would will; I falter, stumbling haltingly, hobbled by feeling which is conflict and which reveals myself as primordial conflict, a cleavage of self from self.[12] Weakness makes evil possible in terms of occasion, origin and capacity. Evil reveals fallibility, but it is fallibility that is the condition of evil (i.e., of human evil). It must be stressed that this fallibility is human choice, human weakness, human fragility, human action.[13]

VI stressed the completeness of the fault, and FM is not different, although in places Ricoeur does seem to back away from the claim. The fault is mentioned as a “foreign body in the eidetics of man,” that the “passage from innocence to fault is not accessible to any description, even an empirical one, but needs to pass through a concrete mythics.”[14] Further, in the claim throughout both that the structure of willing is available like a keyboard and that what is primordial is accessed through the fallen, there seems to be something in human reality that is not touched by the fault, torn or broken. “We have access to the primordial only through what is fallen. In return, if the fallen denotes nothing about that from which it has fallen, no philosophy of the primordial is possible, and we cannot even say that man is fallen.”[15] It is this which is the disproportion. It is at this point in the text that Ricoeur seems to be saying that the fault is not total or complete, that since it allows access back to the ‘state of innocence’ there is some innocence left and therefore the fault is not total. Yet it is the structure as static that was discussed, and to which we have access in VI, not the structure in action or use.

The aberrant is not the constituting; we get at what is primordial through what is fallen. The consciousness of the fault shows me to be the responsible agent of my acts as in VI,

the total and undivided causality of the self over and above its individual acts. The consciousness of fault shows me my causality as contracted or bounded, so to speak, in an act that evinces my whole self. In return, the act that I did not want to commit bespeaks an evil causality behind all determined acts and without bounds. … in penitent retrospection I root my acts in the undivided causality of the self. Certainly we have no access to this self outside of its specific acts, but the consciousness of fault makes manifest in them and beyond them the demand for wholeness that constitutes us. In this way, this consciousness is a recourse to the primordial self beyond its acts.[16]

Again, the problem in FM in relation to the completeness of the fault is stated in the discussion of power; the power that I understand as evil could not be understood as such if I could not imagine a positive or good use of power. This does not contradict the claim to the completeness of the fault, but instead shows how fallen or broken the positing of the structure really is.

Symbolism of Evil

Here we finally move from fallibility to fault.[17] SOE is not the real third volume of either project; instead it is the second part of FM in which the brackets are removed allowing the experience of evil and the fault, although spoken of in mythic and symbolic language, to be discussed. The experience of evil and the fault is not directly spoken of, but is an experience accessed through language. As Ricoeur says, the consciousness itself appears to constitute itself even at its lowest level in symbols, and this “spontaneous hermeneutics of primary symbols”[18] works out its own abstract language for the feelings, emotions, experiences of rupture.

The symbol itself has a double intentionality: a primary intentionality which is literal and a secondary intentionality which points beyond, to a situation of the person in relation to the sacred or Transcendence. The symbols are opaque because the literal primary meaning points to the latent analogical secondary meaning. “This opacity constitutes the depth of the symbol, which, it will be said, is inexhaustible.”[19] Thus the symbol gives because it gives rise to the second meaning. There is an experience underlying the symbols, and this is important for this investigation because otherwise the corruption or the fault would be but a mere symbol and not actually communicating something about what is, in fact, the case. The structure of signification itself is not entirely without difficulty inasmuch as it is this double intentionality or function, both absence and presence – absence because a sign is substituted for the thing or experience which may no longer be there, and presence because there is a thing or an experience to be signified. “Signification, by its very structure, makes possible at the same time both total formalization – i.e., the reduction of signs to “characters” and finally to elements of calculus – and the restoration of a full language, heavy with implicit intentionalities and analogical references to something else, which it presents enigmatically.”[20]

I find it extremely important that Ricoeur, following Husserl, leaves the weight of the words. I did not grow up in a vacuum, nor do I live in one now, and I do not come to experience as a tabula rasa. If I had to claim that I did – i.e., if I had to divest myself of the fullness of language, symbol and experience – there is no way to approach the fault or the experience of evil. There would only be the structure of willing, and other structures that an eidetic analysis could pare down, but no living or acting subject.

Anyone who wished to escape this contingency of historical encounters and stand apart from the game in the name of a non-situated “objectivity” would at the most know everything, but would understand nothing. In truth, he would seek nothing, not being motivated by concern about any question.[21]

The question “Evil – what’s the problem?” would certainly disappear, but then so would all of philosophy.

And so we move on from fallibility to the fault itself. Again, the discussion throughout is one of my responsibility for the evil that I posit, yet a certain passivity is also introduced. The three central symbols here are defilement, sin, and guilt. An explicit discussion of each will not be undertaken at this time; I would rather like to draw attention to the relation to responsibility, to the subject as active and passive, as positing and evil as always-already-there. Consequently, I would like to limit the discussion here to the discussion of the servile will and, still, to the completeness or the totality of the fault.

“The ruse of the fault is to insinuate the belief that participation of the will in more fundamental being would be an alienation, the submission of a slave into the hands of Another.”[22] The positing of the fault as a “withering of the wish for absolute scope”[23] is positing it as outside of my control, as an absolute involuntary when it is, in fact, the case that the fault is the fault only when I posit it, when I yield – i.e., let Another at the helm so that I can set aside my willing and responsibility. The concept of the servile will is not the same as the concept of fallibility; the servile will is an indirect concept that gets its meaning from the symbols – stain, sin, guilt – which Ricoeur is raising to the speculative level. Yet this concept designates an event in freedom, something which happens to a freedom. The servile will, the will in captivity or enslaved by its deviancy, is “the symbol of the evil that the soul inflicts on itself, the symbol of the affection of freedom by itself.”[24] The servile will itself is a symbol, but it is a symbol of an experience of every guilty freedom. Evil, as Ricoeur is discussing it here, is evil that I posit – every I, every individual. I feel the effect of this, and it comes to me as though from the outside. But it is my action that brought it about. Infection is the ultimate symbol of the servile will, yet this is not contact from the outside, but the bad choice that binds itself; i.e., seduction from the outside is an affection of the self by the self, “an auto-infection, by which the act of binding oneself is transformed into the state of being bound. … [I]t is by thinking of the yielding of myself to slavery and the reign over myself of the power of evil as identical that I discover the profound significance of a tarnishing of freedom.”[25]

Thus there is a passive and active; the always-already-there-ness of evil is outside of me, before me, after me, and yet my choice makes me responsible for it. Guilt is specifically my guilt. Guilt reveals the double movement of rupture and resumption, of responsibility and captivity. “[T]he evil for which I assume responsibility makes manifest a source of evil for which I cannot assume responsibility, but which I participate in every time that through me evil enters into the world as if for the first time.”[26] Returning to VI for a moment, “… to become resolved is something, it is actually the most notable moment of freedom, the moment of the leap, of the jump, of the thrust, of the irruption.”[27] These are the terms Ricoeur employs here for when the individual yields and posits. This is the crucial point, viz., that evil is not a mere lack that happens to a hapless being, but it is done by a being that has at its core this possibility of fallibility. Thus, sin is a human possibility as collective, but guilt is for the person as individual. I leap, and I am not pushed.

Does this then destroy the fundamental structure of willing? Or is the case more of “tarnish” or “infection?” Certainly, the first has been shown to not be the case; the structure underlies all willing and the fundamental possibilities likewise remain, yet become unavailable due to self-enslavement. The second question returns us to the completeness of the fault. “Tarnish” and “infection” are symbols as well; the primary meaning points beyond to a secondary meaning which carries the weight of auto-infection. The real anguish of the fault is not the separation from the Transcendent, it is rather in the damaged relation to it, the relation that reveals the damage itself to be my doing, that I am the one who I has made myself who I am to be and that is broken and faulted and positing evil. The fault is the rupture of the relation.

That the fundamental structures remain is revealed in other telling image, viz., that of a country surrendered intact to the enemy which is mentioned both in VI and SOE. It is not that the structures are destroyed by the fault, but that the structures operate as they ought, but for a different master of the will - the passions, the Adversary, et cetera, other than the individual and the proper relation to Transcendence. I do not lose my humanity in the fault.[28] The darkening must be a darkening of something; the fault must run through a structure that is impacted by it, but does not cause it to no longer be a structure. More horrifying is the fact that all the horrid things that we can do can never make us less than human. The horrifying reality that we create is human reality, and never less than that. There is a nostalgia for an account which would say that this is not the case. If these are possibilities for fallible persons, and I am a fallible person, what am I capable of introducing?[29]

Part II: The Wager

“The Symbol Gives Rise to Thought” is the final section of SOE. There a wager is specifically referred to, but the notion that these three texts are a running bet, a gamble, that there are stakes runs through them all. After reading many articles and interviews, as well as the texts here, I feel secure saying that Ricoeur is a betting man, and further, his wager is extensive. He is getting to the experience of evil and the fault, and he gets there by small steps, carefully planned and supported, such that if you miss one, perhaps the bet appears either hedged or outlandish. But that is only if you miss one; if you are not trying skip ahead, and move with the text step by step, he accomplishes the project he set out to do in VI, and moves philosophy toward where it needs to be to discuss evil.

In the introduction to FM, Ricoeur refers to the text as the pivotal point of the whole work. “It shows how we can both respect the specific nature of the symbolic world of expressions and think, not at all “behind” the symbol but “starting from” the symbol. … If we rule out finding a philosophy hidden beneath the symbol, disguised in the imaginative clothing of the myth, what is left is to philosophize starting from the meaning through creative interpretation.”[30] The paradox of evil is that the most moving experience of the person – being lost as a sinner, being incomprehensible to oneself, being absurd – communicates with the need to understand also at the core of the individual, yet here is experience and not explanation, symbols but not plain language to communicate the exact problem. The experience of the fault gives rise to wonder and further questions, but these may not have answers. The philosophy is not “hidden” beneath the symbol; the experience is. Perhaps “hidden” is not the best description, but rather I should say that the experience cannot communicate itself, but requires a language which is specifically a symbolic language. The symbol has a double intentionality already discussed. The symbol has an inexhaustible depth behind it that it does not reduce or replace, but communicates. “In short, it is by interpreting that we can hear again. Thus it is in hermeneutics that the symbol’s gift of meaning and the endeavor to understand by deciphering are knotted together.”[31]

The wagers are valid; here specifically it is to follow what a symbolic language might give of the experience of evil and the fault to incorporate this experience of the person into the understanding of the person.

The task, then, is, starting from the symbols, to elaborate existential concepts – that is to say, not only structures of reflection, but structures of existence. … Then the problem will arise, how the quasi-being and the quasi-nothingness of human evil are articulated upon the being of man and upon the nothingness of his finitude. … Such is the wager. Only he can object to this mode of thought who thinks that philosophy, to begin from itself, must be a philosophy without presuppositions. A philosophy that starts from the fullness of language is a philosophy with presuppositions. To be honest, it must make its presuppositions explicit, state them as beliefs, wager on the beliefs, and try to make the wager pay off in understanding.[32]

This is why the fault was bracketed in VI in order to get at the fundamental possibilities of the human person with beliefs bracketed. But the beliefs come back in with the second half of the discussion of the possibility of fault. FM is still very much a bracketed investigation; SOE is the real unbracketing inasmuch as the beliefs and the symbolism are allowed in. This is why the wager is a doosey; in discussing the structures of existence of the person starting from an already weighty language and from symbolism with presuppositions there is a pay off in understanding, i.e., the person’s own understanding of herself. As far as my own personal interests in evil go, Ricoeur has become “lotto winner number one” with his investigation. I am beginning to fully understand the repercussions, one of which is having a coherent philosophy in which the self if not bisected into being-intelligible-good and non-being-unintelligible-evil, but instead can roam the entire range of the human experience of activity and passivity, the fault as complete, evil as committed and suffered, and real living examined as the material appropriate to philosophy.

Part III: Conclusion

Ricoeur writes on Marcel’s differentiation of problem and mystery, “A problem is a question that can be resolved, generally by obtaining certain information. … Marcel contended that the proper concern of philosophy was with certain intractable “mysteries” which are not subject to present or future resolution.”[33] The whole of human experience falls under this concern of philosophy, which is why there is no complete, done, fini account of the human being. Further, I am not subject to present or future resolution because I make myself in my acts, and those acts are not all done until I am, in which case, we move on to another age, to a type of experience on which I cannot comment because death is that “undiscovered country.” So this would change the question in the end to “Evil – what’s the mystery?”

That leaves a huge project for philosophy open for investigation. The inexhaustible depth behind the symbol, the precomprehension of the self in which there is a “wealth of meaning that reflection is unable to equal,”[34] the investigation of the experience that underlies all narration and myth are all possible without reduction or systematization. Sometimes the experience defies language other than symbolic or metaphoric, but that does not relegate it to unintelligibility or non-being. Ricoeur makes the move to understand evil by freedom, my freedom which is responsible, accountable for making itself.

The decision to approach evil through man and his freedom is not an arbitrary choice but suitable to the very nature of the problem. … The choice of the center of perspective is already the declaration of a freedom that admits its responsibility, vows to look upon evil as evil committed, and avows its responsibility to see that it is not committed. It is this avowal that links evil to man, not merely as its place of manifestation, but as its author. This act of taking-upon-oneself creates the problem; it is not a conclusion but a starting point.[35]

The starting point for the discussion of evil is freedom in that I freely commit evil and that is how I make myself and that for which I must be accountable. This should underlie any account of action or discussion of ethics to be yet carried out.

The fault is complete, yet not a complete destruction of the structure of willing, but rather the complete rift or disproportion of the self from the self in the actions that make the self. Ricoeur’s position remains constant and coherent throughout the three works here, and even though the third volume of the project is non-existent, I cannot see how the fault would lose its completeness in it. Ricoeur’s wager paid off and has provided what is necessary for a philosophy, viz., to have actual human living, experience and action as its concern. This means that human experience is not merely an already or yet to be resolved question(s), but rather a mystery that might not allow a simple answer and may remain unresolved.

Very central to this entire investigation is the fact of evil as committed. “Missing the mark” has been one very prevalent way of looking at evil committed, but here it is but one symbol which does not actually address the real problem since it has little to do with the motives or the inner quality of the agent.[36] Instead here we try to understand evil by freedom which is to take the issue seriously and responsibly. The fault is not fallibility which is a possibility; it is actual as posited in my action. I make myself in my acts, and therefore I make myself guilty, an enslaved willing, and this is the answer to “Evil – what’s the problem?”

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[1] Paul Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature: the Voluntary and the Involuntary, trans. Erazim Kohák (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966), p. 58. Hereafter cited as VI.

[2] Ricoeur defines fault as that which “profoundly alters man’s intelligibility” (3); “a distortion of certain fundamental structures which alone can furnish a guiding thread to the human maze” (3); “the already given degradation of the will and its disguise in the shades of passion” (4); that which perverts the involuntary and the voluntary and “changes our fundamental relation to values and opens the true drama of morality which is the drama of a divided man” (21); imposed by the soul on itself; a bondage to nothing and vanity; only understood as an accident, and interruption, a fall; an alien body in the essential structure of the person; absurd; an absolute irrational in the heart of the person; complete, serious, a failure, a deviation, a rebellion, a going astray. (VI, pages cited in text)

[3] Ricoeur projected three volumes for his project on the will. Although there are three volumes, all of which are referenced in this paper, these, in fact, only cover the first two themes of the project. The third volume, which was to be on the poetics of the will, was never written.

[4] VI, p. 26.

[5] VI, p. 26. The bold emphases, both here and continuing throughout the paper, are my emphasis; Ricoeur’s emphases are always in italics.

[6] With regard to the fault, Ricoeur’s notion of consent (discussed after decision and action) presents and interesting issue worth noting. Consent is the active adoption of a necessity, an acquiescence to the involuntary. It is very important to remember that the fault is bracketed for the entirety of the first volume. In Kohák’s introduction, he jumps ahead too quickly and states,

It is in the analysis of symbols of evil as stain, sin, and guilt that Ricoeur succeeds in showing the unity of the paradoxical relation of man as agent and patient, as act and fact, or, in the terminology of the first volume, as freedom and nature, the voluntary and the involuntary in existence. Here evil as fact infecting me from the outside (stain) appears as involving me in a broken relationship (sin) to which I consent (guilt). (VI, p. xxxi)

In a sense, Kohák is correct; he is using fault, in a broader sense than he believes Ricoeur to be, as that which refers to the disproportion between the fundamental possibilities and the actual state of affairs. The disproportion is part, or rather a manifestation, of the fault. But guilt both is and is not consent. As discussed in VI, consent is to the absolute involuntary, to necessity – viz., life, the unconscious, and character. Evil as yielded to is willed by a freedom, not an acquiescence. That evil exists before I posit it is in fact true, and to that one would consent; but I only know evil as that which I inaugurate.

[7] Paul Ricoeur, Fallible Man, trans. Charles Kelbey (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986), p. 141 – “In himself and for himself man remains torn. It is this secret rift, this non-coincidence of self to self that feeling reveals. Feeling is conflict and reveals man as primordial conflict.” Hereafter Fallible Man will be referred to as FM.

[8] Throughout this text I found Ricoeur’s choice of words very enlightening. Per the translator, “The word “fault,” at least in Fallible Man, should be taken in this sense as it is in the geological sense: a break, a rift, a tearing. Ricoeur frequently uses the words faille (break, breach, fault), which is akin to fallibilite, as well as ecart (gap, di-gression), felure (rift), dechirement (a tearing, torn) to describe man’s existential condition.” (FM, p. xxxv) Given what has been so far detailed, the vocabulary employed is very telling and ought not to be broadened or diluted as Kohák did in his introduction. Rift, tearing, gap, et cetera, all refer to the relation(s) damaged in the fault and not to the destruction of the structure of willing itself. Here in FM the fault is the human existential condition; the fundamental possibilities of the structure of willing in VI are there in the willing of the person, but all is not as it ought to be; i.e., what ought to function in positing, in the positing itself cannot function as it ought.

[9] FM, p. xxxv.

[10] FM, p. xlvi.

[11] VI, p. 139.

[12] See Romans 7:15-19 in light of discussions.

[13] Ricoeur writes:

It is this transition from innocence to fault, discovered in the very positing of evil, that gives the concept of fallibility all its equivocal profundity. Fragility is not merely the “locus,” the point of insertion of evil, nor even the “origin” starting from which man falls; it is the “capacity” for evil. To say that man 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. And yet evil arises from this weakness only because it is posited. (FM, p. 145-6)

Fallibility is the constitutional weakness that makes evil possible, the fragility of a being that is disproportionate to itself, but this is not the involuntary or the necessary. Again, as was discussed above in VI, evil is in the positing of evil by the person and not merely in the fact of the fallibility. “This limitation is man himself. … Man is the Joy of Yes in the sadness of the finite. This “mixture” has appeared to us as the progressive manifestation of the fault that makes of man, mediator of the reality outside of himself, a fragile mediation for himself.” (FM, p. 140)

[14] FM, p. xlii.

[15] FM, p. 76.

[16] FM, xlviii.

[17] I moved without segue from fallibility to the fault itself in FM. Ricoeur does not; but in only looking at the completeness of the fault, I have been a bit single-minded – hopefully not to the detriment of the investigation. One would not want to mistake fallibility for the fault; fallibility is the possibility inherent in the person, but the fault itself is posited and is a rift, a brokenness that seizes the whole person when posited. Again, fallibility is the possibility of the positing.

[18] Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), p. 9. Hereafter Symbolism of Evil will be cited as SOE.

[19] SOE, p. 15.

[20] SOE, p. 17-8.

[21] SOE, p. 24.

[22] SOE, p. 29.

[23] VI, p. 466.

[24] SOE, p. 154.

[25] SOE, p. 156.

[26] SOE, p. 313-4.

[27] VI, p. 171.

[28] Ricoeur writes:

To infect is not to destroy, to tarnish is not to ruin. The symbol here points toward the relation of radical evil to the very being of man, to the primordial destination of man; it suggests that evil, however positive, however seductive, however affective and infective it may be, cannot make a man something other than a man; infection cannot be a defection, in the sense that the dispositions and functions that make the humanity of man might be unmade, undone, to the point where a reality other than human reality would be produced. … [E]vil is not symmetrical with the good, wickedness is not something that replaces the goodness of a man; it is the staining, the darkening, the disfiguring of an innocence, a light, and a beauty that remain. However radical evil may be, it cannot be as primordial as goodness. The symbol of defilement already says this about the servile will, and it says it through he symbol of captivity; for when a country falls intact into the hands of the enemy, it continues to work, to produce, to create, to exist, but for the enemy. (SOE, p. 156)

The structures as described in VI are the same keyboard on which two pianists play – one for the enemy and one for the ally. It is the same keyboard for both, but the keyboard itself does not make the music, the pianist does. The keyboard is the static structure. The intention of malice is in the player.

[29] And, by consequence, how in need of grace am I? “It is, then, impossible to reflect philosophically on fault while omitting the fact, embarrassing for reflection, that the ultimate meaning of fault could be manifested only by means of the great contrasts set up by [Paul]: justification by the practice of the law and justification by faith; boasting and believing; works and grace. Whatever weakens those contrasts dissipates their meaning.” SOE, p. 148. As cited in an earlier note, this must be left for another time.

[30] FM, p. xliv.

[31] SOE, p. 351.

[32] SOE, p. 356-7.

[33] FM, p. xi.

[34] FM, p. 6.

[35] FM, p. xlvi-xlvii.

[36] For a further discussion of chattat, “missing the target,” please see SOE, p. 72.