PAMELA SUE ANDERSON’S JOURNEYING WITH PAUL RICOEUR

Abstract

This essay on the life and work of Pamela Sue Anderson traces aspects of her scholarly work that I was very fortunate to share with her over twenty-six years. What brought us together was our commitment to feminism but also our strong interest in the work of Paul Ricoeur – which seemed to many people an odd combination, given Ricoeur’s silence on the topic of women and gender issues. Over the years, we met at conferences, read each other’s books, and published articles in each other’s publications. My principal aim is to chart her own journey and her relation to the work of Paul Ricoeur. What was remarkable in Pamela’s work was her passionate commitment, which was especially contagious. Her early work on the philosopher Kant was rigorous in ways that helped to initiate a wealth of new scholarship and increased an awareness of Ricoeur’s Kantian influence. In relation to Ricoeur’s work, Pamela was intrigued by his silence on women, but she realized that, given his dialogical approach, she could attempt not only to introduce feminist insights but also to expand his ideas so as to incorporate philosophy of religion. First, she integrated Ricoeur’s approach of the hermeneutics of suspicion to assist in this task. Then she adapted his writings on hospitality. But it was only when Ricoeur turned his attention to human suffering and vulnerability in his later years – a topic that resonated deeply with Pamela – that she was moved to write specifically in ways that helped incorporate her insights with Ricoeur’s in constructive ways. Her final publications reflect her wise and thought-provoking conclusions.

Keywords:

• friendship
• feminism
• vulnerability
• fragility
• responsibility
• epistemic justice

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Pamela Sue Anderson, “In Conversation with Sophia Blackwell,” The Oxford Muse. See <https://www.oxfordmuse.com/?q=node/147> (accessed 22 Nov. 2019).

2 Pamela contributed an essay to a book in honour of Alan Montefiore on his eighty-fifth birthday. See Pamela Sue Anderson, “The Subject’s Loss of Self-Confidence in its Own Ability to Understand Itself” in Life and Philosophy: Essays to Honour Alan Montefiore on his 85th Birthday, eds. Catherine Audard-Montefiore et al. (Oxford: FEP, 2011) n. pag.

3 Montefiore was also responsible for introducing Pamela to the work of French philosopher Michèle Le Doeuff, whose ideas would also have a strong impact on her work.

4 Ricoeur further declares: “Philosophy has attempted in various ways to colonize this outside entirely for its own benefit and to make it its own. Renouncing this hubris seems to me the first stage,” and being “prepared to recognize its Other and to be instructed by it.” Ricoeur in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn (Chicago: Open Court, 1995) 472.

5 Pamela Sue Anderson, Ricoeur and Kant: Philosophy of the Will (Atlanta: Scholars, 1993).

6 Pamela Sue Anderson and Jordan Bell, Kant and Theology (London: T&T Clark/Continuum, 2010).

7 Anderson, “In Conversation with Sophia Blackwell.”

8 Ibid.

9 Pamela Sue Anderson, “The Case for a Feminist Philosophy of Religion: Transforming Philosophy’s Imagery and Myths,” Journal of Philosophy of Religion: Ars Disputandi 1 (2001): 1–17, available <https://doi.org/10.1080/15665399.2001.10819707> (accessed 22 Nov. 2019).

10 Anderson, “The Case for a Feminist Philosophy of Religion” 1.

11 Pamela did acknowledge that men could also encounter problems, but her main focus was the lives of women.

12 Anderson, “The Case for a Feminist Philosophy of Religion” 3.

13 This acknowledgement is an early reference to what today is named “intersectionality.” See Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43.6 (1991): 1241–99.

14 Anderson, “The Case for a Feminist Philosophy of Religion” 5.

15 See Morny Joy, “Encountering Otherness” in Continental Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion (Dordrecht: Springer, 2012) 221–46.

16 See especially Pamela Sue Anderson, “‘Standpoint’: Its Rightful Place in Realist Epistemology,” Journal of Philosophical Research 26 (2002): 130–53; “Autonomy, Vulnerability and Gender,” Feminist Theory 4.2 (2003): 149–64; Re-visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion: Reason, Love and Epistemic Locatedness (London: Routledge, 2012).

17 Pamela met Sandra Harding in her first teaching position in the United States at the University of Delaware. See Sandra Harding, The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004).

18 Michèle Le Doeuff, The Philosophical Imaginary, trans. Colin Gordon (London: Continuum, 2002).

19 Anderson, “The Case for a Feminist Philosophy of Religion” 5.

20 Ibid. 6.

21 See Pamela’s evaluation of Ricoeur’s work on Antigone in “Lost Confidence and Human Capability: A Hermeneutic Phenomenology of the Gendered, yet Capable Subject,” Text Matters 4.4 (2014): 35–38.

22 bell hooks, Yearning, Race, Gender and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End, 1999) 12–13.

23 Pamela Sue Anderson, “Life, Death and (Inter)Subjectivity: Realism and Recognition in Continental Feminism,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 60.1–3 (2006): 43.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid. 44.

26 See Judith Butler, “Longing for Recognition: Commentary on the Work of Jessica Benjamin,” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 1.3 (2000): 271–90, doi:10.1080/15240650109349159. Anderson also acknowledges that her work on recognition owes a debt to Beauvoir’s reading of Hegel and the influence it had on a certain stream of French feminism. See note 7. “Life, Death and (Inter)Subjectivity” 43.

27 Certain sections of this paper on Ricoeur’s work have been previously published in Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy (Spring 2016). These sections are reprinted here with permission from the journal Editor.

28 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992).

29 Paul Ricoeur in Charles Reagan, ed., Paul Ricoeur: His Life and Work (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996) 114. Although the interview occurred in 1986, Reagan’s book of interviews was not published until 1996.

30 Ibid.

31 Paul Ricoeur in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn (Peru, IL: Open Court, 1995) 475.

32 Ibid. 473.

33 Paul Ricoeur, “Evil” in The Encyclopedia of Religion, vol. 5, editor-in-chief Mircea Eliade (New York: Macmillan, 1987) 199–208 (207).

34 Paul Ricoeur, Fallible Man [1960], trans. C.A. Kelbley (Chicago: Regnery, 1986) 146.

35 Paul Ricoeur, “Fragility and Responsibility” in Paul Ricoeur: The Hermeneutics of Action, ed. R. Kearney (London: Sage, 1996) 15–22 (16).

36 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another 172.

37 Ricoeur understood homo capax as the cornerstone of his philosophical anthropology. He describes four capabilities as indispensable to the constitution of human well-being, and introduces them with four verbs: “I can speak, I can do things, I can tell a story, and I can be imputed, as an action can be imputed to me as its true author.” See Paul Ricoeur, “Ethics and Human Capability: A Response” in Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought, eds. John Wall, William Schweiker, and W. David Hall (New York and London: Routledge, 2002) 280.

38 Paul Ricoeur, “A Response by Paul Ricoeur” in Paul Ricoeur and Narrative: Context and Contestation, ed. Morny Joy (Calgary: U of Calgary P, 1997) xxiv.

39 Ricoeur in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur 367.

40 Ricoeur, “A Response by Paul Ricoeur” xi.

41 Paul Ricoeur, “The Human Being as the Subject Matter of Philosophy” in The Narrative Path: The Later Work of Paul Ricoeur, eds. T. Peter Kemp and David M. Rasmussen (Boston: MIT P, 1989) 89–101 (101).

42 Paul Ricoeur, “Autonomy and Vulnerability” in Reflections on the Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007) 85–86.

43 Paul Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, trans. David Pellauer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007).

44 Judith Butler has defined these terms as follows: “‘Precariousness’ is a figure used to designate the fragility of life to call attention to the vulnerability that constitutes the human condition” (Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009) 79).

45 Pamela Sue Anderson, “Silencing and Speaker Vulnerability: Undoing an Oppressive Form of (Wilful) Ignorance,” ed. Nick Bunnin, in Love and Vulnerability: Thinking with Pamela Sue Anderson, ed. Pelagia Goulimari, Spec. issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 25.1–2 (2020): Abstract (online only). This was presented initially at a celebration of International Women’s Day at Durham University, on 8 March 2016. The conference was entitled “Resounding Voices: Women, Silence and the Production of Knowledge.”

46 “Autonomy, Vulnerability and Gender,” Feminist Theory 4.2 (2003): 149–64.

47 Ibid. 149.

48 “Arguing for ‘Ethical’ Vulnerability: Towards a Politics of Care?” in Exploring Vulnerability, eds. Heike Springhart and Günter Thomas (Göttingen and Bristol, CT: Vandenhoeck, 2017) 147–62. This article was published posthumously.

49 Ibid. 162. This particular paper resulted from Pamela’s participation in the “Vulnerability Group” of the Enhancing Life Project that was supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

50 Ibid.

51 Ibid.

52 Ibid. It is unfortunate that Pamela was not able to read certain of Judith Butler’s later works where she qualifies some of her earlier views. In one of her recent books Butler observes:

I wish to point out that even as public resistance leads to vulnerability, and vulnerability (the sense of “exposure” implied by precarity) leads to resistance, vulnerability is not exactly overcome by resistance, but becomes a potentially effective mobilizing force in political mobilizations.

While Butler’s work is more involved with politics than Pamela’s philosophical analyses, Butler’s revision of vulnerability from possible conflict to a mode of activism could establish grounds for a certain compatibility or comparison with Pamela’s creative reading of vulnerability. See Judith Butler, “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance” in Vulnerability in Resistance, eds. Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2016) 14.

53 “Arguing for ‘Ethical’ Vulnerability” 149.

54 Ibid. 147–48.

55 Again, Butler, this time with her two co-editors, poses a question that could lead beyond the impasse of inaction or negation that worries Pamela. They ask:

What follows when we conceive of resistance as drawing from vulnerability as a resource of vulnerability, or as part of the very meaning or action of resistance itself? What implications does this perspective have for thinking about the subject of political agency? (Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Letitia Sabsay in “Introduction” in Vulnerability in Resistance 1)

56 “Arguing for ‘Ethical’ Vulnerability” 148.

57 Ibid. 151.

58 Ibid. 149.

59 Ibid. 151.

60 Ibid.

61 Ibid. 152.

62 Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1982). Pamela also remarks that this book was crucial in identifying women’s modes of care relationship in contrast to the rule of justice, and, in one sense, provided women with a form of recognition and agency.

63 “Arguing for ‘Ethical’ Vulnerability” 159.

64 Ibid. 153.

65 “Enhancement” is a term that Pamela encountered when she participated in the Enhancing Life Project. In a late interview she discusses her own understanding of the phrase. She says:

I see enhancing life as a process. It is not static. Change is constantly happening. Enhancing life would be creative and give confidence; it’s about striving. And striving is a kind of vulnerability because you’re open and reaching for something that isn’t there yet […] My focus on vulnerability is on transformative experiences […] when people have been able to discover not only their openness to possible harm or pain, but also an openness to change and growth. (See “Life-Giving Philosophy: A Q&A with Dr. Pamela Sue Anderson,” 2 Feb. 2016, available <http://enhancinglife.uchicago.edu/blog/life-giving-philosophy-a-q-and-a-with-dr-pamela-sue-anderso> (accessed 22 Nov. 2019))

66 Pamela Sue Anderson, Review of Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another in Journal of Literature and Theology 8.3 (1994): 328–30.

67 Pamela Sue Anderson, “Ricoeur in Dialogue with Feminist Philosophy of Religion: Hermeneutic Hospitality in Contemporary Practice” in Feminist Explorations of Paul Ricoeur’s Philosophy, eds. Annemie Halsema and Frenanda Henriques (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2016) 199–220.

68 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another 172.