|
Paul
Ricoeur was among the most impressive philosophers of the 20th
century, both in the unusual breadth and depth of his philosophical
scholarship and in the innovative nature of his thought. He was a
prolific writer, and his work is essentially concerned with that grand
theme of philosophy: the meaning of life. Ricoeur's "tensive" style focuses on the tensions running through the very structure of human being. His constant
preoccupation was with a hermeneutic of the self, fundamental to which
is the need we have for our lives to be made intelligible to us.
Ricoeur's flagship in this endeavor is his narrative theory. Though a Christian philosopher whose work in theology is well-known and
respected, his philosophical writings do not rely upon
theological concepts, and are appreciated by non-Christians and
Christians alike. His most widely read works are The Rule of Metaphor, From
Text to Action, and Oneself As Another, and the
three volumes of Time and Narrative. His other significant
books include Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, Conflict of
Interpretations, The Symbolism of Evil, Freud and Philosophy, and
Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the
Involuntary.
Table of Contents (Clicking on the links below will take you to those parts of this article)
1. Life and Works
Jean Paul Gustave Ricoeur was born on
February 27, 1913, at Valence, France, and he died in Chatenay-Malabry, France
on May 20, 2005. He lost both his parents
within his first few years of his life and was raised with his sister
Alice by his paternal grandparents, both of whom were devout
Protestants. Ricoeur was a bookish child and successful student. He
was awarded a scholarship to study at the Sorbonne in 1934, and
afterwards was appointed to his first teaching position at Colmar,
Alsace. While at the Sorbonne he first met Gabriel Marcel, who was to
become a lifelong friend and philosophical influence. In 1935 he was
married to Simone Lejas, with whom he has raised five children.
Ricoeur served in World War II – spending most of it as a
prisoner of war – and was awarded the Croix de Guerre. He was
interred with Mikel Dufrenne, with whom he later wrote a book on the
work of Karl Jaspers. After the war Ricoeur returned to teaching,
taking positions at the University of Strasbourg, the Sorbonne,
University of Paris at Nanterre, the University of Louvain and
University of Chicago.
Ricoeur is a traditional philosopher in the sense that his work is
highly systematic and steeped in the classics of Western philosophy.
His is a reflective philosophy, that is, one that considers the most
fundamental philosophical problems to concern self-understanding.
While Ricoeur retains subjectivity at the heart of philosophy, his is
no abstract Cartesian-style subject; the subject is always a situated
subject, an embodied being anchored in a named and dated physical,
historical and social world. For this reason his work is sometimes
described as philosophical anthropology.
Ricoeur is a post-structuralist hermeneutic philosopher who employs
a model of textuality as the framework for his analysis of meaning,
which extends across writing, speech, art and action. Ricoeur
considers human understanding to be cogent only to the extent that it
implicitly deploys structures and strategies characteristic of
textuality. It is Ricoeur's view that our self-understandings, and
indeed history itself , are "fictive", that is, subject to the
productive effects of the imagination through interpretation. For
Ricoeur, the human subjectivity is primarily linguistically
designated and mediated by symbols. He states that the "problematic
of existence" is given in language and must be worked out in language
and discourse. Ricoeur refers to his hermeneutic method as a
"hermeneutics of suspicion" because discourse both reveals and
conceals something about the nature of being. Unlike
post-structuralists such as Foucault and Derrida, for whom
subjectivity is nothing more than an effect of language, Ricoeur
anchors subjectivity in the human body and the material world, of
which language is a kind of second order articulation. In the face of
the fragmentation and alienation of post-modernity, Ricoeur offers
his narrative theory as the path to a unified and meaningful life;
indeed, to the good life.
2. Style
Ricoeur has developed a
theoretical style that can best be described as "tensive". He weaves
together heterogeneous concepts and discourses to form a composite
discourse in which new meanings are created without diminishing the
specificity and difference of the constitutive terms. Ricoeur's work
on metaphor and on the human experience of time are perhaps the best
examples of this method, although his entire philosophy is explicitly
such a discourse. For example, in What Makes Us Think?
Ricoeur discusses the nature of mental life in terms of the tension
between our neurobiological conceptions of mind and our
phenomenological concepts. Similarly, in the essay "Explanation and
Understanding" he discusses human behavior in terms of the tension
between concepts of material causation, and the language of actions
and motives. The tensive style is in keeping with what Ricoeur
regards as basic, ontological tensions inherent in the peculiar
being that is human existence, namely, the ambiguity of belonging to
both the natural world and the world of action (through freedom of
the will). Accordingly, Ricoeur insists that philosophy find a way
to contain and express those tensions, and so his work ranges across
diverse schools of philosophical thought, bringing together insights
and analysis from both the Anglo-American and European traditions, as
well as from literary studies, political science and history.
The tensions are played out in our ability to take different
perspectives on ourselves and so to formulate diverse approaches and
methods in understanding ourselves. The different theoretical
frameworks employed in philosophy and the sciences are not simply the
result of ignorance or power. They are the result of tensions that
run through the very structure of human being; tensions which Ricoeur
describes as "fault lines." Ricoeur's entire body of work is an
attempt to identify and map out the intersections of these numerous
and irreducible lines that comprise our understandings of the human
world. Ricoeur calls these "fault lines" because they are lines that
can intersect in different ways in all the different aspects of human
lives, giving lives different meanings. However, as points of
intersection of discourses, these meanings can come apart. Ricoeur
argues that the stability we enjoy with respect to the meanings of
our lives is a tentative stability, subject to the influences of the
material world, including the powers and afflictions of one's body,
the actions of other people and institutions, and one's own emotional
and cognitive states. Given the fundamental nature of these tensions,
Ricoeur argues that it is ultimately poetics (exemplified in
narrative), rather than philosophy that provides the structures and
synthetic strategies by which understanding and a coherent sense of
self and life is possible.
3. Influences
Ricoeur acknowledges
his indebtedness to several key figures in the tradition, most
notably, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel and Heidegger. Aristotelian teleology
pervades Ricoeur's textual hermeneutics, and is most obvious in his
adoption of a narrative approach. The concepts of "muthos" and
"mimesis" in Aristotle's Poetics form the basis for Ricoeur's
account of narrative "emplotment," which he enjoins with the innovative
powers of the Kantian productive imagination within a general theory
of poetics.
The influence of Hegel is manifest in Ricoeur's employment of a
method he describes as a "refined dialectic." For Ricoeur, the
dialectic is a "relative moment[s] in a complex process called
interpretation" (Explanation and Understanding", 150). Like Hegel,
the dialectic involves identifying key oppositional terms in a
debate, and then proceeding to articulate their synthesis into a new,
more developed concept. However, this synthesis does not have the
uniformity of a Hegelian synthesis. Ricoeur's method entails showing
how the meanings of two seemingly opposed terms are implicitly
informed by, and borrow from, each other. Within the dialectic, the
terms maintain their differences at the same time that a common
"ground" is formed. However, the common ground is simply the ground
of their mutual presupposition. Ricoeur's dialectic, then, is a unity
of continuity and discontinuity. For example, in "Explanation and
Understanding" Ricoeur argues that scientific explanation implicitly
deploys a background hermeneutic understanding that exceeds the
resources of explanation. At the same time, hermeneutic understanding
necessarily relies upon the systematic process of explanation.
Neither the natural sciences nor the human sciences are fully
autonomous disciplines. A key dialectic that runs through Ricoeur's
entire corpus is the dialectic of same and other. This is a
foundational dialectic for him, and so, as might be expected, it
structures his discussions and dissections of every field of
philosophy he enters: selfhood, justice, love, morality, personal
identity, knowledge, time, language, metaphor, action, aesthetics,
metaphysics, and so on.
Unlike the Hegelian dialectic, for Ricoeur, there is no absolute
culminating point. There is, nevertheless, a kind of absolute, an
objective existence that is revealed indirectly through the
dialectic. This is most evident in the third volume of Time and
Narrative, where he argues that phenomenological time presupposes
an objective order of time (cosmological time), and in The Rule of
Metaphor, where he argues that language belongs to, and is
expressive of, extra-linguistic reality. Despite this apparent
concession to realism, Ricoeur insists that the objective cannot be
known as such, but merely grasped indirectly and analytically. Here,
the Kantian influence comes to the fore. For Ricoeur, objective
reality is the contemporary equivalent of Kantian noumena: although
it can never itself become an object of knowledge, it is a kind of
necessary thought, a limiting concept, implied in objects of
knowledge.
This view informs Ricoeur's "tensive" style. Although we can know,
philosophically that there is an objective reality, and, in that
sense, a metaphysical constraint on human existence, we can never
understand human existence simply in terms of this objectivity. What
we must appeal to in order to understand our existence are our
substantive philosophical and ethical concepts and norms. This sets
up an inevitable tension between the contingency of those norms and
the brute fact of objective reality, evidenced in our experience of
the involuntary, for example, as aging and dying. Again, Kant looms
large. We necessarily regard ourselves from two perspectives: as the
author of our actions in the practical world, and as part of, or
passive to, cause and effect in the natural world. Such is the
inherently ambiguous and tensive nature of human, mortal subjects. It
is this condition, then, with which philosophy must grapple. And it
is to this condition that Ricoeur offers narrative as the appropriate
framework.
4. The Philosophy
There are two closely related
questions that animate all of Ricoeur's work, and which he considers
to be fundamental to philosophy: "Who am I?" and "How should I live?"
The first question has been neglected by much of contemporary
analytical and post-modern philosophy. Consequently, those
philosophies lack the means to address the second question.
Postmodernism self-consciously rejects traditional processes of
identity formation, depicting them as familial and political power
relations premised upon dubious metaphysical assumptions about
gender, race and mind. At the same time, contemporary philosophy of
mind reduces questions of "who?" to questions of "what?", and in
doing so, closes down considerations of self while rendering the
moral question one of mere instrumentality or utility. In relation to
the question "Who am I?", Ricoeur acknowledges a long-standing debt
to Marcel and Heidegger, and to a lesser extent to Merleau-Ponty. To
the moral question, the debt is to Aristotle and Kant. In addressing
the question "who am I?" Ricoeur sets out first to understand the
nature of selfhood – to understand the being whose nature it is to
enquire into itself.
In this endeavor, Ricoeur's philosophy is driven by the desire to
provide an account that will do justice to the tensions and
ambiguities which make us human, and which underpin our fallibility.
Ricoeur's interest here can be noted as early as The Voluntary and
The Involuntary, drafted during his years as a prisoner of war.
There he explores the involuntary constraints to which we are
necessarily subject in virtue of our being bodily mortal creatures,
and the voluntariness necessary to the idea of ourselves as the
agents of our actions. We have, as he later describes it, a "double
allegiance", an allegiance to the material world of cause and effect,
and to the phenomenal world of the freedom of the will by which we
tear ourselves away from the laws of nature through action. This
conception of the double nature of the self lies at the core of
Ricoeur's philosophy.
Ricoeur rejects the idea that a self is a metaphysical entity; there
is no entity, "the self," there is only selfhood. Selfhood is an
intersubjectively constituted capacity for agency and self-ascription
that can be had by individual human beings. Selfhood proper is
neither simply an abstract nor an animal self-awareness, but both. It
essentially involves an active grasp of oneself as a "who"--that is,
as a person who is the subject of a concrete situation, a situation
characterized by material and phenomenal qualities. This entails
understanding oneself as a named person with a time and place of
birth, linked to other similarly named persons and to certain ethnic
and cultural traditions, living in a dated and named place. In
Oneself As Another Ricoeur describes how the complexity of the
question of "who?" opens directly onto a certain way of articulating
the question of personal identity:
"how the self can be at one and the same time a person of whom we
speak and a subject who designates herself in the first person while
addressing a second person. . . The difficulty will be . . .
understanding how the third person is designated in discourse as
someone who designates himself as a first person (34-5)".
Drawing on Heidegger's notion of Dasein, Ricoeur goes on to write
that "To say self is not to say myself . . . the passage from
selfhood to mineness is marked by the clause "in each case" . . . The
self . . . is in each case mine" (OAA 180). What he means by this is
that each person has to take one's selfhood as one's own; each must
take oneself as who one is; one must "attest" to oneself.
Subjectivity, or selfhood, is for Ricoeur, a dialectic of activity
and passivity because we are beings with a "double nature,"
structured along the fault lines of the voluntary and the
involuntary, beings given to ourselves as something to be known.
Ricoeur shares Marcel's view that the answer to the question "Who am
I?" can never be fully explicated. This is because, in asking "Who am
I?", "I" who pose the question necessarily fall within the domain of
enquiry; I am both seeker and what is sought. This peculiar
circularity gives a "questing" and dialectical character to selfhood,
which now requires a hermeneutic approach. This circularity has its
origins in the nature of embodied subjectivity.
Ricoeur's account is built upon Marcel's conception of embodied
subjectivity as a "fundamental predicament"(Marcel, 1965). The
predicament lies in the anti-dualist realization that "I" and my body
are not metaphysically distinct entities. My body cannot be
abstracted from its being mine. Whatever states I may attribute to my
body as its states, I do so only insofar as they are attributes of
mine. My body is both something that I am and something that I
have: it is "my body" that imagines, perceives and
experiences. The unity of "my body" is a unity sui generis.
Yet my body is also that over which I exercise a certain
instrumentality through my agency. However, the agency that effects
that instrumentality is nothing other than "my body." There is no
I-body relation; the primitive term here is "my body."
The inherent ambiguity of the "carnate body" or "corps-sujet"
can be directly experienced by clasping one's own hands (an example
often employed by Marcel and Merleau-Ponty). In this experience the
distinction between subject and object becomes blurred: it isn't
clear which hand is being touched and which is touching; each hand
oscillates between the role of agent and object, without ever being
both simultaneously. One cannot feel oneself feeling. This example is
supposed to demonstrate two points: first, that the ambiguity of my
body prevents the complete objectification of myself, and second,
that ambiguity extends to all perception. Perception is not simply
passive, but rather, involves an active reception (a concept
that Ricoeur takes up and develops in his account of the ontology of
the self and one's own body in Oneself As Another, see
319–329). In other words, my body has an active role in structuring
my perceptions, and so, the meaning of my perceptions needs to be
interpreted in the context of my bodily situation.
The non-coincidence of myself and my body constitutes a "fault line"
within the structure of subjectivity. The result is that knowledge
of myself and the world is not constituted by more or less accurate
facts, but rather, is a composite discourse--a discourse which charts
the intersection of the objective, intersubjective and subjective
aspects of lived experience. On this view, all knowledge, including
my knowledge of my own existence, is mediate and so calls for
interpretation. This also means that self-understanding can never be
grasped by the kind of introspective immediacy celebrated by
Descartes. Instead, as human beings we are never quite "at one" with
ourselves; we are fallible creatures. Thus, who I am is not an
objective fact to be discovered, but rather something that I must
achieve or create, and to which I must attest.
On Ricoeur's view, the question "Who am I ?" is a question specific
to a certain kind of being, namely, being a subject of a temporal,
material, linguistic and social unity. The ability to grasp oneself
as a concrete subject of such a world requires a complex mode of
understanding capable of integrating discourses of quite heterogenous
kinds, including, importantly, different orders of time. It is to the
temporal dimension of selfhood that Ricoeur has most directly
addressed his hermeneutic philosophy and narrative model of
understanding.
5. Time and Narrative
Central to Ricoeur's defense of
narrative is its capacity to represent the human experience of time.
Such a capacity is an essential requisite for a reflective
philosophy. Ricoeur sets out his account of "human time" in Time
and Narrative, Volume 3. He points out that we experience time in
two different ways. We experience time as linear succession, we
experience the passing hours and days and the progression of our
lives from birth to death. This is cosmological time--time expressed
in the metaphor of the "river" of time. The other is phenomenological
time; time experienced in terms of the past, present and future. As
self-aware embodied beings, we not only experience time as linear
succession, but we are also oriented to the succession of time in
terms of what has been, what is, and what will be. Ricoeur's concept
of "human time" is expressive of a complex experience in which
phenomenological time and cosmological time are integrated. For
example, we understand the full meaning of "yesterday" or "today" by
reference to their order in a succession of dated time. To say "Today
is my birthday" is to immediately invoke both orders of time: a
chronological date to which is anchored the phenomenological concept
of "birthday." Ricoeur describes this anchoring as the "inscription"
of phenomenological time on cosmological time (TN3 109).
These two conceptions of time have traditionally been seen in
opposition, but Ricoeur argues that they share a relation of mutual
presupposition. The order of "past-present-future" within
phenomenological time presupposes the succession characteristic of
cosmological time. The past is always before the present which is
always after the past and before the future. The order of succession
is invariable, and this order is not part of the concepts of past,
present or future considered merely as existential orientations. On
the other hand, within cosmological time, the identification of
supposedly anonymous instants of time as "before" or "after" within
the succession borrows from the phenomenological orientation to past
and future. Ricoeur argues that any philosophical model for
understanding human existence must employ a composite temporal
framework. The only suitable candidate here is the narrative
model.
Ricoeur links narrative's temporal complexity to Aristotle's
characterization of narrative as "the imitation of an action".
Ricoeur's account of the way in which narrative represents the human
world of acting (and, in its passive mode, suffering) turns on three
stages of interpretation that he calls mimesis1 (prefiguration of the
field of action), mimesis2 (configuration of the field of action),
and mimesis3 (refiguration of the field of action). Mimesis1
describes the way in which the field of human acting is always
already prefigured with certain basic competencies, for example,
competency in the conceptual network of the semantics of action
(expressed in the ability to raise questions of who, how,
why, with whom, against whom, etc.); in the use of symbols
(being able to grasp one thing as standing for something else); and
competency in the temporal structures governing the syntagmatic order
of narration (the "followability" of a narrative).
Mimesis2 concerns the imaginative configuration of the elements
given in the field of action at the level of mimesis1. Mimesis2
concerns narrative "emplotment." Ricoeur describes this level as "the
kingdom of the as if" Narrative emplotment brings the diverse
elements of a situation into an imaginative order, in just the same
way as does the plot of a story. Emplotment here has a mediating
function. It configures events, agents and objects and renders those
individual elements meaningful as part of a larger whole in which
each takes a place in the network that constitutes the narrative's
response to why, how, who, where, when, etc. By
bringing together heterogeneous factors into its syntactical order
emplotment creates a "concordant discordance," a tensive unity which
functions as a redescription of a situation in which the internal
coherence of the constitutive elements endows them with an
explanatory role.
A particularly useful feature of narrative which becomes apparent at
the level mimesis2 is the way in which the linear chronology of
emplotment is able to represent different experiences of time. What
is depicted as the "past" and the "present" within the plot does not
necessarily correspond to the "before" and "after" of its linear,
episodic structure. For example, a narrative may begin with a
culminating event, or it may devote long passages to events depicted
as occurring within relatively short periods of time. Dates and times
can be disconnected from their denotative function; grammatical
tenses can be changed, and changes in the tempo and duration of
scenes create a temporality that is "lived" in the story that does
not coincide with either the time of the world in which the story is
read, nor the time that the unfolding events are said to depict. In
Volume 2 of Time and Narrative, Ricoeur's analyses of Mrs.
Dalloway, The Magic Mountain and Remembrance of Things
Past centre on the diverse variations of time produced by the
interplay of a three tiered structure of time: the time of narrating;
the narrated time; and the fictive experience of time produced
through "the conjunction/disjunction of the time it takes to narrate
and narrated time" (TN2 77). Narrative configuration has at hand a
rich array of strategies for temporal signification.
Another key feature of mimesis2 is the ability of the internal logic
of the narrative unity (created by emplotment) to endow the
connections between the elements of the narrative with necessity. In
this way, emplotment forges a causal continuity from a temporal
succession, and so creates the intelligibility and credibility of the
narrative. Ricoeur argues that the temporal order of the events
depicted in the narrative is simultaneous with the construction of
the necessity that connects those elements into a conceptual unity:
from the structure of one thing after another arises the conceptual
relation of one thing because of another. It is this conversion that
so well "imitates" the continuity demanded by a life, and makes it
the ideal model for personal identity and self-understanding.
Mimesis3 concerns the integration of the imaginative or "fictive"
perspective offered at the level of mimesis2 into actual, lived
experience. Ricoeur's model for this is a phenomenology of reading,
which he describes as "the intersection of the world of the text and
the world of the reader"(TN1 71). Not only are our life stories
"written," they must be "read," and when they are read they are taken
as one's own and integrated into one's identity and
self-understanding. Mimesis3 effects the integration of the
hypothetical to the real by anchoring the time depicted (or
recollected or imputed) in a dated "now" and "then" of actual, lived
time.
Mimesis is a cyclical interpretative process because it is inserted
into the passage of cosmological time. As time passes, our
circumstances give rise to new experiences and new opportunities for
reflection. We can redescribe our past experiences, bringing to light
unrealized connections between agents, actors, circumstances, motives
or objects, by drawing connections between the events retold and
events that have occurred since, or by bringing to light untold
details of past events. Of course, narrative need not have a happy
ending. The concern of narrative is coherence and structure, not the
creation of a particular kind of experience. Nevertheless, the
possibility of redescription of the past offers us the possibility of
re-imagining and reconstructing a future inspired by hope. It is this
potentially inexhaustible process that is the fuel for philosophy and
literature.
6. Ethics
Besides the metaphysical
complexity and heterogeneity of the human situation, one of Ricoeur's
deepest concerns is the tentative, even fragile status of the
coherence of a life. His conception of ethics is directly tied to
his conception of the narrative self. Because selfhood is something
that must be achieved and something dependent upon the regard, words
and actions of others, as well as chancy material conditions, one can
fail to achieve selfhood, or one's sense of who one is can fall
apart. The narrative coherence of one's life can be lost, and with
that loss comes the inability to regard oneself as the worthy subject
of a good life; in other words, the loss of self-esteem.
Ricoeur's ethics is teleological. He argues that human life has an
ethical aim, and that aim is self-esteem: "the interpretation of
ourselves mediated by the ethical evaluation of our actions.
Self-esteem is itself an evaluation process indirectly applied to
ourselves as selves" (The Narrative Path, 99). In short,
self-esteem means being able to attest to oneself as being the worthy
subject of a good life, where "good" is an evaluation informed not
simply by one's own subjective criteria, but rather by
intersubjective criteria to which one attests. This entails another
moral concept: that of imputation. As the subject of my actions, I am
responsible for what I do; I am the subject to whom my actions can be
imputed and whose character is to be interpreted in the light of
those actions. Ricoeur describes the ethical perspective that arises
from this view of the subject as "aiming at the good life" with and
for others, in just institutions" (OAA 172). Such a perspective
merely spells out the premise of this practical and material
conception of selfhood, with its presupposition of the world of
action, lived with others. For Ricoeur, a life can have an aim
because the teleological structure of action extends over a whole
life, understood within the narrative framework. The ethical life is
achieved by aiming to live well with others in just institutions.
Ricoeur's view of selfhood has it that we are utterly reliant upon
each other. While Ricoeur emphasizes the importance of the first
person perspective and the notion of personal responsibility, his is
no philosophy of the radical individual. He emphasizes that we are
"mutually vulnerable", and so the fate (self-esteem) of each of us
is tied up with the fate of others. This situation has a normative
dimension: we have an indebtedness to each other, a duty to care for
each other and to engender self-respect and justice, all of which are
necessary to the creation and preservation of self-esteem.
While duty runs deep, Ricoeur argues that it is nevertheless
preceded by a certain reciprocity. In order to feel commanded by
duty, one must first have the capacity to hear and respond to the
demand of the Other. That is, there must be some fundamental,
primordial openness and orientation to others for the power of duty
to be felt. Prior to duty there must be a basic reciprocity, which
underlies our mutual vulnerability and from which duty, as well as
the possibility of friendship and justice, arises. Here, Ricoeur
emphasizes the ethical primacy of acting and suffering.
Ricoeur calls this phenomenon "solicitude" or "benevolent
spontaneity" (OAA 190). It makes the relation of self and Other (and
thus, ethics) primordial, or ontological – hence the title of
Ricoeur's book on ethics, Oneself As Another. Self-esteem is
said to arise from a primitive reciprocity of spontaneous, benevolent
feelings, feelings which one is also capable of directing toward
oneself, but only through the benevolence of others. This fundamental
reciprocity is prior to the activity of giving. This can be
demonstrated in the situation of sympathy, where it is the Other's
suffering (not acting) that one shares. Here, Ricoeur argues that
"from the suffering Other there comes a giving that is no longer
drawn from the power of acting and existing, but precisely from
weakness itself" (OAA 188-9). In this case, the suffering Other is
unable to act, and yet gives. What the suffering Other gives to he or
she who shares this suffering is precisely the knowledge of their
shared vulnerability and the experience of the spontaneous
benevolence required to bear that knowledge.
As might be supposed from Ricoeur's view of embodied subjectivity,
one is always already an Other to oneself. So, love and understanding
for others, and love and understanding for oneself, are two sides of
the same sheet of paper, so to speak. One becomes who one is through
relations with the Other, whether in the instance of one's own body
or another's. Reciprocity forms the basis of those productive and
self-affirming relations central to so much of ethics, namely
friendship and justice. Its corruption leads to self-loathing and the
destruction of self-esteem, which goes hand-in-hand with harm to
others and injustice. For Ricoeur, friendship and justice become the
chief virtues because of their crucial role in the well-being of
selfhood, and thus, in maintaining the conditions of possibility of
selfhood. Friends and just institutions not only protect against the
suffering of self-destruction to which one is always vulnerable, they
provide the means for reconstructing and redeeming damaged lives. The
theme of redemption runs right through Ricoeur's work, and no doubt
it has a religious origin. However, the notion of redemption can be
viewed in secular terms as the counterpart to the constructive nature
of one's identity, and the temporal complexity of the human situation
which calls for interpretation.
7. References and Further Reading
- Marcel, Gabriel. Being and Having: an existentialist diary
(New York: Harper and Row, 1965).
- Marcel, Gabriel. The Mystery of Being: 1, Reflection and
Mystery (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1960).
- Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and The Invisible, trans.
Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968).
- Ricoeur, Paul. "Explanation and Understanding" in From Text to
Action, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John Thompson (Evanston, Ill:
Northwestern University Press, 1991).
- Ricoeur, Paul. "Humans as the
Subject Matter of Philosophy" in The Narrative Path, The Later
Works of Paul Ricoeur, eds. T. Peter Kemp and David Rasmussen
(Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1988).
- Ricoeur, Paul. "Intellectual Autobiography" in Lewis Edwin Hahn, ed.,
The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, The Library of Living Philosophers
Volume XXII (Chicago, Illinois: Open Court, 1995).
- Ricoeur, Paul. "What is Dialectical?" in Freedom and Morality
ed. John Bricke, (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 1976).
a. Selected Ricoeur Bibliography
- History and Truth, trans.
Charles A Kelbley, (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University
Press, 1965)
-
Fallible Man, trans. Charles A Kelbley (New York: Fordham
University Press, 1986)
-
Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary
(Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1966)
-
Husserl: An Analysis of his Phenomenology, trans. E. G.
Ballard and L. E. Embree (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University
Press, 1966)
-
The Symbolism of Evil, trans. E. Buchanan (New York and
Evanston: Harper-Row, 1967)
-
Freud and Philosophy: an essay on interpretation, trans. D.
Savage (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1970)
-
Tragic Wisdom and Beyond, with Gabriel Marcel, trans. P.
McCormick and S. Jolin (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1973)
-
The Conflict of Interpretations. Essays in Hermeneutics,
trans. D. Ihde (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1974)
-
The Rule of Metaphor, multidisciplinary studies in the creation
of meaning in language (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978)
-
Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Essays on Language, Action
and Interpretation edited and trans. J. B. Thompson (Cambridge
and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981)
-
Time and Narrative, Volumes 1-3, trans. Kathleen Blamey and
David Pellauer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984
-1988)
-
From Text to Action, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John Thompson
(Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1991)
-
Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992)
-
Tolerance between intolerance and the intolerable
(Providence: Berghahn Books, 1996)
-
Critique and conviction : conversations with FranÁois Azouvi and
Marc de Launay trans. Kathleen Blamey (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1998)
-
Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies,
with Andre LeCocque (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
1998)
-
The Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 2000)
-
What Makes Us Think? A Neuroscientist and a Philosopher Argue
About Ethics, Human Nature and the Brain, with Jean-Pierre
Changeux, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton
University Press, 2000)
b. Further Reading
- Henry Isaac Venema: Identifying
selfhood : imagination, narrative, and hermeneutics in the thought of
Paul Ricoeur (Albany, N.Y. : State University of New York Press,
2000)
- Bernard P. Dauenhauer : Paul Ricoeur : the promise and risk of
politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998)
- Charles E. Regan, Paul Ricoeur, his life and his work
(Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1996)
- Lewis Edwin Hahn, ed. The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, The Library
of Living Philosophers Volume XXII (Chicago, Illinois: Open
Court, 1995)
- David Wood, ed. On Paul Ricoeur (London & New York:
Routledge, 1991)
- S.H. Clark: Paul Ricoeur (London and New York: Routledge, 1990)
- Patrick L. Bourgeois and Frank Schalow: Traces of understanding:
a profile of Heidegger's and Ricoeur's hermeneutics (Amsterdam
and Atlanta, GA : Rodopi, 1990)
- T. Peter Kemp and David Rasmussen: The Narrative Path: The Later
Works of Paul Ricoeur (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1989)
- John B. Thompson: Critical hermeneutics : a study in the thought
of Paul Ricoeur and Jurgen Habermas (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1981)
- Charles E. Reagan ed: Studies in the Philosophy of Paul
Ricoeur (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1979)
- Don Ihde, Hermeneutic Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Paul
Ricoeur (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971)
|
