Ricoeur on self-recognition & the undependable hipster

I’ve felt it time to freshen my philosophical enquirical abilities—I was worrying I was getting soft, getting a little too confident in my beliefs and assumptions and needing some exercises in critical thought. In my last trip to the library I picked up Paul Ricoeur’s The Course of Recognition, which I recently finished an initial reading of.

I don’t really know about Ricoeur except that he was a respected 20th century continental philosopher. I was just perusing the philosophy section and this book caught my eye. Not having much context to Ricoeur’s work, it was difficult to grasp exactly what he was trying to do through the movement of the text.

That being said, I did find something rather interesting, though it really has very little to do with the text directly. I ask for some leniency as I realize my thoughts are probably mostly sophistry.

I’m going to use a slice of his work from this book to make a inferential jump from the theoretical to the practical, which I’m not sure is correct or unproblematic.

In the second chapter (of three), the topic of discussion is that of self recognition. Within this discussion there was one point that I found interesting. He describes how one’s self recognition is tied up with space and time. I will tease out this understanding of self recognition through time.

Ricoeur describes how through remembrance & promise we can see ourselves positioned in the past and also in the future. By remembering an event, remembering myself at some previous point I recognize myself as that person at that previous point, thus having this continuity of self extended through time.

The same goes for promises which cause our recognition of self to be pushed into the future. Through my act of promising, I am identifying my future self, and placing obligations or restrictions my future. The promise links up with both recognition in time and recognition before others. It is this idea of the promise that I want to explore in a different direction.

Riceour sees the act of the promise as an act of self recognition and also a recognition before others. We don’t make promises with rocks or other objects, but with people. Hold this thought while I side step for a moment.

I am a 26 year old man; I am educated and live a fairly well off life especially by world standards. I know many others that are of a similar standing, 20 & 30 somethings, educated, affluent, your basic cool cats. On the whole this is collection of good people, yet they have one glaring problem—they tend to be unreliable. They have difficulty making plans very far into the future. Or rather I should say they have a difficulty making plans and sticking to them, for very far into the future.

It seems that it isn’t just the limited set of people that I know; let me take the cultural phenomena of the hipster as my example. There are numerous lists of the type “you might be a hipster if…” floating around on the internet. These lists describe the angst of being pigeon holed, the fear of going beyond the ironic jest.

Though these described phenomenons are more apparent in the unmarried, I see them also in the married couples, though it usually makes itself apparent in slightly different forms.

I say all this to say, it seems there is a correlation between the unreliability of my generation with the a problem of self recognition. We are incapable of defining ourselves so it manifests itself in forms such as lacking the ability to promise or the follow through to made promises. It is as if, we {as a generation} don’t recognize ourself in that future self who would uphold the promise.

I’m not sure if there is a colleration, but where does the Other fit into this problem. As I stated earlier, the recognition of the promise is in time but also before others. Is it that we have a problem with the Other, our recognition of them fails, we treat them like objects instead of subjects?

Furthermore the mashup of culture, from youtube videos to intergenerational clothing styling, speaks of a certain alienation from one’s self. What does it say about us that we lack the ability to create except in the fashion of the remix and the mashup? Could also our ironic jest towards history also be tied to our failure of self recognition through time. Do we mock history because we can’t understand ourselves extended through history? Do we mashup past culture in an attempt to make sense of who we?