Customer Reviews

Symbolism of Evil

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I struggled with this book the first time I read the wood-pulp edition (I'm writing now about the Kindle version) some 20 years ago. It is not that I've become smarter (unlikely, if not impossible) but I have become more patient and perhaps even more nuanced in my own reading habits.

I originally choked on this because I was reading it as orthodox Christian apologetics. It is not. Ricouer is certainly working within the Christian/Hebraic tradition that he was born into and inherited. But the phenomenological analysis he offers of the evolution of a true *symbolism* of evil, from its roots in mythology and pre-articulate experience, is intended as a model that transcends the examples deployed in its examination.

This is a fascinating work, well worth engaging even when one is satisfied that the argument is wrong. Ricouer's style is not bogged down with what might be called "traditional Gallic abandonment of clarity." (Or, at least, called such by persons unimpressed with French self-involved self-importance than myself.) As such, while the discussion is subtle, it is readable. On the other hand, his scholarship is solid and merits engagement, and the historical sweep of his analysis is quite enough to fire even so tediously analytical mind as my own.

Again, my praise for Ricouer's work here is not over the correctness of his argument, but the worthiness of engaging that argument. I am satisfied that I am not sufficiently versed in the relevant details to judge the ultimate merits of Ricouer's claims. But even if he is "wrong," he poses an important stepping stone in the development of one's thoughts on these subjects. As Alfred North Whitehead famously observed, it is more important for a proposition to be interesting than true. The advantage of truth is, it adds to interest.