David Pellauer: Continuum

RICOEUR: A GUIDE FOR
THE PERPLEXED
DAVID PELLAUER
.\\
continuum
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David Pellauer 2007
First published 2007
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ISBN-lO: HB: 0-8264-8513-8
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ISBN-13: HB: 978-0-8264-8513-7
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This book is for Mary and Michael
CONTENTS
Abbreviations
1 Reading Ricoeur
2 Freedom and Nature
3 Ricoeur's Turn to Hermeneutics
4 The Fullness of Language and Figurative Discourse
5 Selfhood and Personal Identity
6 Memory, Recognition, Practical Wisdom
Notes
Bibliography/Further Reading
Index
viii
1
.. 5
il'42
64
90
109
139
145
151
C&C
CI
CR
FM
FN
FP
FTA
HHS
HT
IT
J
LLP
MHF
OAA
RJ
RM
SE
T&N
ABBREVIATIONS
Critique and Conviction
The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics
The Course of Recognition
Fallible Man
Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary
Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation
From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II
Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences
History and Truth
Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of
Meaning
The Just
The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, Library of Living
Philosophers, 22
Memory, History, Forgetting
Oneself as Another
Reflections on the Just
The Rule of Metaphor
The Symbolism of Evil
Time and Narrative
CHAPTER 1
READING RICOEUR
Students may well feel perplexed encountering the philosophy of Paul
Ricoeur for the first time. There is so much of it, if one is just count-
ing the number of books and essays. Moreover, if they look at his
books in chronological order they will find that Ricoeur keeps adding
new topics. He even makes adjustments in how he does philosophtas
he finds new problems and new challenges to what he is doing. Since
many contemporary philosophers confine themselves to a single ques-
tion or problem the new reader may wonder whether he really has a
significant philosophical lesson to teach us. In fact, there isaH overall
unity to his work and a common problem or at least set of problems
that runs through it. This has become clear since his death in 2005,
which closed the canon, so to speak. There will not be another book,
on another apparently new topic, even if he was considering one when
his health began to fail for the last time.! That almost all of his major
published work is now available in English translation means that we
can look at his work as a whole and trace themes through it, knowing
where it ends. When we do that, we see not only that he had many sig-
nificant things to say on a wide range of topics, but that his many
books and essays do hold together as a single philosophical project,
even if this project was left incomplete in the end. But he also said that
such incompleteness is not necessarily a bad thing. Philosophy, he
maintained, applies itself to something it cannot exhaust, so philo-
sophical questions can always be reopened and refined. His death, in
this sense, leaves us with work to do ourselves based on what he was
able to accomplish. To do that, however, we must first begin to grasp
what he was about as a philosopher.
This book is written to help students get started on that task. It is
an introduction to the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur for those who
RICOEUR: A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED
may not know much, if anything, about it, but who do have some
commitment to philosophical inquiry. It can also serve as a contri-
bution to understanding and better appropriating his thought for
those who are already familiar with it to some degree. Because there
is so much material to consider, my perspective is not critical but
rather expository. One could call it a philosophical narrative, given
Ricoeur's own contributions to the theory of narrative discourse. As
such, it proceeds in a basically chronological fashion to present an
overview of his major writings in terms of a few central themes that
run through them and tie them together.
Of course, any exposition must reflect a perspective and some
interpretive choices. Mine reflect decisions about what is centrally
important to understanding his thought and its contribution to phi-
losophy. Such an approach must also inevitably leave things out.
Ricoeur, for example, was very knowledgeable about the writings of
the major figures in history of philosophy and returned to these
figures again and again both in his teaching and in his writing. But I
have chosen to ignore his detailed discussions of other philosophers
except insofar as they contribute to seeing how his work unfolds over
time. I realize that this means there really is not sufficient discussion
here of how and why the history of philosophy was important to
Ricoeur - and how this contributed to his own uIiderstanding of
what he is about as a philosopher. This is a question, therefore, that
any serious reader of Ricoeur who decides to pursue his work
further will consider. I believe what I have said about it here will be
sufficient to show why this is so, but also that it was not necessary to
do so in greater detail here.
Ricoeur was a philosopher who was involved in the world beyond
professional philosophy to a unique degree. Scholars outside the
philosophy guild across a wide variety of disciplines have perceived
his work as important. Besides philosophers, it has been discussed
by historians, literary critics, legal theorists and jurists, biblical
exegetes and theologians, who see in it resources that can help them
in their own efforts. They see that he often addresses challenges to
their work that call for a response on their part, while, at the same
time, they recognize how seriously he takes their fields and has incor-
porated them into his own project. I have not had the space to pursue
these influences here or to discuss how Ricoeur is read by scholars
in other fields. I do hope, however, that those coming at Ricoeur
from other disciplines will find the account of his work presented
2
READING RICOEUR
here helpful to their understanding and appropriation of what is
valuable in his work.
Ricoeur also had a public influence beyond that of most univer-
sity professors of philosophy. Anyone who looks at his complete bib-
liography and his biography will see this. He spoke often to groups
of influential people in the churches, society and politics. He wrote
regularly for French newspaper opinion pages and well-known jour-
nals, such as Esprit, with which he was associated for many years.
Interviews with him that were published and those broadcast on
radio and television would fill a large book, maybe two. He knew
many leading figures and politicians. The Pope invited him to dinner.
Vaclav Havel wanted him to speak at his inauguration as president
of Czechoslovakia following the fall of communist rule.
2
This is also
material I have ignored in this volume. The bibliography listed at the
end of this book will point the way for those who wish to explore his
public side further. .
Ricoeur did present accounts of his intellectual biography s e v ~ r l
times over the years. Because all this material is available in English,
I have chosen not to dwell on it here.
3
Charles Reagan has written a
convenient short biography of Ricoeur that also includes a more
personal memoir of their friendship for those who wish to know
more about Ricoeur's life and experiences (see Reagan 1996). He was
raised by his grandparents, following the death of his mother shortly
after his birth and that of his father in World War I. He lost a dear
sister to tuberculosis in his youth. He himself spent five years as a
prisoner of war of the Germans during World War II. During this
time, with a colleague, Mikel Dufrenne, he taught philosophy to
other prisoners in the camp - and did it so well that the French gov-
ernment agreed to grant degrees to his students following their
release at war's end. His life was threatened during the Algerian War
because of the stand he took against it. He was actually assaulted by
a student who dumped a waste basket on his head in the aftermath
of the student riots in Paris in 1968. He endured a number of vicious
verbal attacks by French intellectuals who did not like what he was
saying. He lost a son to suicide and saw his beloved wife die before
him. In a word, he knew life can have a tragic dimension because he
experienced the ups and the downs of the twentieth century. He did
not seek to avoid allowing this to influence what he was about as a
philosopher, even while he committed himself to its autonomy and
goal of speaking truth to everyone. The many translations of his
3
work, in later years into more than twenty different languages, as
well as the prizes and honorary degrees he received, show that he
found a large audience already during his lifetime.
4
Yet he always
maintained that he would rather that people discuss his work rather
than talk about him. Through this book I hope the reader will find
encouragement to enter into that conversation. That would be one
gift I could return to Professor Ricoeur in gratitude for all he taught
me and for his friendship over the years.
CHAPTER 2
FREEDOM AND NATURE
Freedom and Nature was Ricoeur's doctoral dissertation. It was
meant to be the opening volume of a projected three-volume phi-
losophy of the will. In it Ricoeur presents 'something like' an eidetic
phenomenology of the reciprocity of the voluntary and the inyol-
untary in human existence. That is, his goal is to grasp these "two
central notions, which make freedom meaningful, in terms of some-
thing like their essence, or as conceptually as possible, beginning
from a pure phenomenological description. He acknowledges that
there are inherent limits to such an approach, however, because.
human existence is an embodied existence. This raises the problem
of motivation as influencing any act said to be freely chosen. What
is more, human existence is temporal. But the eidetic approach of
phenomenology in seeking an intuition of essences abstracts from
the unfolding of action over time, by dividing it into atemporal
stages. The question arises therefore how we are to make sense of
the overall unity in time of these separate stages. Finally, there is
the sheer event aspect of any act of choice to consider. Something
happens when we act, but a free act is not just another natural event.
It is a new beginning, one that we will, that we chose. So what makes
it a voluntary act for which we are responsible and not just another
predetermined occurrence in the sequence of natural events? This
is the underlying issue of human freedom that Ricoeur wants to
address in his philosophy.
WHY DOES HE START WITH THIS QUESTION?
A major assumption of Ricoeur's thought is that while philosophy
has its autonomy, it is always dependent on something that precedes
5
it, which it never fully absorbs or exhausts. Philosophy does have its
autonomy in that it chooses its starting point, the question from
which it begins. But this question already is situated and motivated
by something problematic outside of - and prior to - all philosophy:
the non-philosophical or perhaps life, being, or reality. Philosophy
arises therefore in response to this non-philosophical reality that
precedes it, seeking to make it intelligible in ways that are adequate
to what is at issue concerning our experience of it. This idea of
an autonomy without independence for philosophy runs through-
out Ricoeur's work, setting limits to what philosophy can achieve
without ever denigrating or denying its achievements. Ricoeur's is
an understanding of philosophy, therefore, that implies that philo-
sophical questions are always capable of being reopened, and also
that there may be unrealized resources in earlier philosophers' works
that can be taken up and developed further. This is one reason why
he will reject all talk about an end of philosophy in the sense of phi-
losophy having exhausted itself. It also accounts for the tension
between continuity and discontinuity that runs through his later
constructive formulations, particularly his theory of narrative dis-
course but also his 'little ethics' and his philosophical anthropology
of the capable human being.
We need also to note that there are a number of assumptions and
influences operative in the way Ricoeur poses his initial philosophi-
cal question and project. These can be taken as sources of his thought
without taking away from the originality of his starting point. First,
drawing on the philosophies of Gabriel Marcel, Martin Heidegger
and Karl Jaspers, Ricoeur sees that the subject-object model that has
characterized philosophical thinking since Descartes is problematic.
It does not finally make sense of our experience of ourselves, others,
or the world we live and act in. This subject-object model presents
itself as a theory of knowledge, but Ricoeur sees that it is based on
what really is a metaphysical model in which a subject is related to an
object through being conscious of that object and representing this
object to itself as subject. This model is metaphysical because it pre-
supposes that the subject and the object in question, or the two of
them in relation to each other, are and must be real. Descartes'
famous discovery of the cogito - our lived experience of our inabil-
ity to deny our own existence - thus involves both epistemological
and metaphysical aspects. The epistemological aspect is seen in that
fact that in the cogito I know something for certain, that I exist, hence
6
FREEDOM AND NATURE
some knowledge is possible and therefore, according to Descartes, we
can establish a basis for recognizing what else can count as knowl-
edge: anything equivalent to the self-evidence of the cogito or deriv-
able from it. I Furthermore, since we experience our existence as real,
this experience presents an initial example of what reality must mean
for us. But because Descartes first formulated this as the discovery of
an epistemological model, he did not really develop its metaphysical
side. His philosophy sought to account for the very possibility of
knowledge, over against the threat of scepticism, by 'showing' us
such knowledge. When something is known in this way, because it
cannot be doubted, and hence is certain, then it can rightly be said to
be the object of knowledge and hence known 'objectively' Yet at the
same time, this known object is always an object for a knowing
subject, the one who performs and experiences the cogito. In this
sense, for the Cartesian model there is no objectivity without subjec-
tivity, no objective knowledge without subjectivity, without some
knowing subject to whom it is known. Correspondingly, the& is
apparently no objectivity without subjectivity, a point that Ricoeur
will take very seriously in formulating his own philosophical method.
However, he also sees that this subject is as yet no one in particular;
it is anyone at all insofar as that person is a knower.
2
Paradoxically,
because it is no one, it can also be everyone; hence it is both everyone
and no one, at a price that has to be considered.
Two further problems set the framework for Ricoeur's initial
philosophical question. The Cartesian subject knows itself; at least
it knows itself as existing, because as long as it thinks, it cannot
doubt its own existence. But if what a subject knows is always an
object, there is a problem about its knowledge of itself. Does it know
itself as an object, and hence no longer as a subject? Or is there
another kind of knowing, which we might call subjective knowing,
which is also a kind of knowledge, but not objective knowledge?
Secondly, there is a question of how one subject knows another
subject. When he discovered the cogito, Descartes already puzzled
over this question. How can we recognize another human mind,
since all we see are objects standing over against us however intelli-
gent their behaviour may seem to us? These problems raised by this
Cartesian model continued to be a major topic for Ricoeur, to the
point that in the end he came to see the model as 'broken' and in need
of reformulation as the problem of selfhood, the selfhood of a
capable human being.
7
Another factor influencing Ricoeur to pose his initial question as
he does was Kierkegaard and what we label as existentialism. As
Kierkegaard forcefully argued, given Descartes' model, the subject
is not and can never be an object, for the very subject-object model
divides the two into separate categories at the same time that it
relates them through what Descartes called consciousness, partic-
ularly that specific form of consciousness we call knowing. For
Kierkegaard, and for existentialism in general, this leads to a major
problem. The model calls for a subject, but the subject as already
stated is no one in particular. It is me only in the abstract sense that
I can be, am a knower. But this seems to leave something important
out, whatever it is that makes me, me - and you, you and not
someone else. Yet, at the same time, without such subjectivity, can I
really say that I am me, that I exist? This is another reason why, in
the long run, Ricoeur will propose that what is at issue is the nature
of the self, where this self is more an agent than a knower, but an
agent who has a specific identity and who is responsible for his or her
actions.
I will label this emphasis on 'the uniqueness, the singularity of
individual existence - what Ricoeur will subsequently call our self-
hood the existential thread in Ricoeur's philosophy. The three
twentieth-century thinkers already mentioned, Marcel, Heidegger
and Jaspers, all influence how he takes up this existential critique of
Descartes and questions the subject-object model. For Marcel, the
subject, the existing individual, is always incarnate. But this leads to
the puzzle that we say both that I have a body and that I am a body.
How are We to account for the unity of the I and its lived body?
Marcel tried to make sense of this through a practice of concrete
reflection, which he sought to illustrate dramatically through writing
plays as well as philosophy. For Ricoeur, this unity of the incarnate
subject is most evident in human action, hence his concern for the
question of freedom.
For Heidegger, at least in Being and Time, Dasein, which names
the existence each one of us is, has to be understood as existing as
being-in-the-world rather than as a subject who objectifies over
against itself what the world contains from a position itself not
located inside this world. Hence Dasein has to be described in terms
of a model or structure of finite, worldly existence rather than
simply as some form of purely subjective existence that stands over
against the world and even outside it. Heidegger's critique was also
8
FREEDOM AND NATURE
directed against those versions of philosophical idealism where all
objects and even the world itself, understood as another object, exist
somehow only 'within' the subject or as constituted by the subject,
as in neo-Kantianism. But he also held that neither can Dasein be
explained as ultimately something objective, as merely one more
thing among many, with subjectivity playing no part, for how then
could this be known since there is no knower? Therefore Heidegger
held that both subjectivity and objectivity themselves have to be
understood hermeneutically through an interpretation derived from
this more fundamental being-in-the-world. It is this version of
Heidegger's analysis of Dasein that Ricoeur most valued and holds
onto throughout his own work.
Ricoeur's first published book, written with Mikel Dufrenne, was
on Jaspers, whose work Marcel had encouraged him to consider.
Jaspers' philosophy of Existenz, another way of naming human
existence, still makes use of the subject-object model, yet at the same
time tries to get beyond it through a method he calls 'transctfuding
thinking' That is, if we apply the subject-object model to what
Jaspers calls limit situations such as death, suffering and guilt, his
claim is that these experiences somehow point beyond or transcend
themselves, or at least they suggest a kind of lived experience that
goes beyond the subject-object model. This experience is revelatory
of the limits of the subject-object model and yet itself is never ade-
quate to what lies beyond it and encompasses it. Jaspers names this
encompassing other Transcendence, a term Ricoeur appropriates
from him. In fact, the most important thing Ricoeur does take from
Jaspers is the question how it might be possible to think such
Transcendence, although Ricoeur is more willing than was Jaspers
to relate it to the idea of God as found in Judaism and Christianity.
We can say therefore that in his early work, and even all through its
subsequent development, Ricoeur is looking for a philosophical
approach to such Transcendence starting from its relation to human
freedom and action. One of his fundamental philosophical goals, as
with Jaspers, is to make sense of Transcendence without turning it
into an object or a subject in a way that collapses us back into the
subject-object model.
Another influence on Ricoeur's early project of a philosophy
of the will is Immanuel Kant's presentation of the antinomy of
freedom and causality, or as we might say today, of freedom and
determinism. According to Kant, if we are truly free, we must be able
9
to act in such a way as to spontaneously initiate a course of events;
we must be able to do something for the first time that would not oth-
erwise have occurred. But science says that in nature every thing has
a cause, hence there seems to be no room for such freedom. Ricoeur
refuses to understand this antinomy as a strict either/or, where one
thesis must be true and the other false. In his own interpretation of
Kant, Ricoeur will hold that Kant draws on two different languages
in the way he formulates this antinomy, one that speaks of our lived
experience of ourselves as free, the other which corresponds to a sci-
entific language that presupposes an understanding of causality that
leaves no room for freedom. We are unable to reduce these two lan-
guages to just one of them. To do so would be again to limit our-
selves to talk either of subjectivity or objectivity, as though either
could exist independently. Neither, however, do we have a way
simply to leap beyond these two ways of speaking, not even given the
progress being made today in what is now called cognitive science.
3
We can see from all this why Ricoeur called his initial project
Freedom and Nature, echoing the Kantian problem. Ricoeur's inno-
vation in dealing with it is that- rather than phrasing the basic
problem in terms of freedom and determinism, he does so in terms
of what he will characterize as the reciprocity of the voluntary and
the involuntary sides of our lived experience.
This brings us to the final figure we need to take notice of in listing
some of the major influences on Ricoeur's approach to a philosophy
of the will. This is Edmund Husserl, the founder of modern phe-
nomenology as a way of doing philosophy. Ricoeur had translated
one of Husserl's most important texts into French while a prisoner
of war in Germany during World War II. Husserl, who was origi-
nally educated to be a mathematician, was a systematic thinker, a
very systematic thinker. When he turned to philosophy, he claimed
to have discovered in phenomenology a method for doing philoso-
phy in such a way as to resolve all its questions. HusserI's emphasis
on the importance of method in philosophy was what first attracted
Ricoeur to his work, as a way of moving beyond Marcel's less sys-
tematic, more impressionistic way of taking up philosophical prob-
lems. Ricoeur also recognized that Husserl had been able to modify
Descartes' SUbject-object model in an important way by seeing that
it really presupposes three, not just two, terms. Our consciousness is
always consciousness of something; hence it is necessary to attend
to how our consciousness 'intends' its object. In effect, Descartes'
10
FREEDOM AND NATURE
model should really be seeri as a 'subject intends an object' Husserl
added that, given this revised model, the phenomenologist's task is
to describe things as they appear within it, without taking into
account any assumption about whether these appearances - or phe-
nomena - actually exist or not. Just describe the phenomena as they
appear to our awareness of them. To make this rigorously descrip-
tive approach possible, Husserl introduced the idea of a reduction
or bracketing of the question of actual existence. This reduction -
or actually a series of reductions - was meant to leave us finally with
only the essence of the phenomena in question. Simply describe
things as they appear was Husserl's watchword, but also realize that
how they appear (in the sense of how they are intended) can vary
and also needs description. An example can be helpful here. A visu-
ally perceived object appears differently from thought about an
ideal, mathematical one. We never see more than three sides of a
cube at one time, but we can think it as a six-sided object. In q()th
instances we have a cube, once as a perceived cube, once as a ton-
ceptualized one. Thus, as in this example, for phenomenology both
the intended object and the intention directed toward it can be iden-
tified and described. More importantly, they always appear in rela-
tion to one another, so while phenomenologists may concentrate on
one or the other component of intentional consciousness, in the end
they have to acknowledge their mutual dependence and include it in
their accounts.
Many of Husserl's own phenomenological descriptions were
devoted to examples drawn from visual perception, given his inter-
est in resolving what he took to be the pressing questions in the
theory of knowledge. However, there is also the question of the
status of the subject pole in his model, at least in the sense of
whether it too is something that can be described. Husserl himself
took it as a transcendental subject, something more like a point
source from which intentional consciousness radiates, leading him
to characterize his phenomenology as a form of transcendental ide-
alism. Ricoeur was unwilling to accept this interpretation of phe-
nomenology given his own commitment to understanding human
existence as embodied existence in the world. What he does take
from Husserl therefore is the understanding of phenomenology as a
way of doing philosophy based on a descriptive method, one that
seeks to begin by not making assumptions about whether the things
described really exist or not, even though for Ricoeur it is beyond
11
question that there is always a sense of a larger, more complex reality
operative at the limits of what is described, what we have called non-
philosophical Transcendence beyond the subject-object model.
RICOEUR'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE VOLUNTARY AND
INVOLUNTARY
In his own proposed systematic project, Ricoeur seeks to apply this
descriptive approach to human action rather than to perception,
Husserl's major concern. This is the phenomenology that he presents
in Freedom and Nature, which he wrote as his doctoral dissertation.
What such a revised phenomenology discovers, he claims, are mean-
ings or the basic principles governing the intelligibility of our lived
experience, meanings that allow us to make sense of human action
in terms of the reciprocity of the voluntary and the involuntary in
our lived experience. The voluntary and the involuntary have to be
considered as reciprocal because otherwise neither phenomenon is
really intelligible. In a purely objective world, one without freedom,
there would be nothing to understand, because there would be
no one to understand it, no subjectivity. But pure subjectivity with-
out objectivity is also unintelligible if we consider human action,
because this subjectivity would not exist in a world beyond itself or
be able to act at all since the voluntary can reveal itself only by
means of and in relation to the involuntary. This is why we have to
consider them together.
Beyond their reciprocity, Ricoeur further holds that philosophy
has to weight the voluntary over the involuntary, again for a reason
that traces back at least to Descartes if not to Augustine before him.
One of the striking things about Descartes' cogito argument is that
the subject is aware of itself; it knows that it knows, that it thinks.
Ricoeur, too, stands in this reflexive tradition that emphasizes self-
awareness and with it our self-knowledge besides our knowledge of
the world, even while admitting that such self-knowledge is always
dependent on our knowledge of the world. He will modify this
reflexive tradition, however, by holding that we never have direct or
immediate knowledge of ourselves. We know ourselves only indi-
rectly in terms of the objective world and our actions in it.
Why does Ricoeur say that he will begin from an attempt at pure
description of the phenomena in question? Because his goal is under-
standing more than explanation. It is the meaning of the phenomena
12
FREEDOM AND NATURE
relating to the voluntary and the involuntary and their implications
for human self-understanding and responsible action that he is
seeking. In keeping with the Cartesian and the phenomenological
model, such meaning is always meaning for someone, for a subject.
This is why Ricoeur's own phenomenological descriptions will always
give the most weight to the voluntary aspect of the voluntary-
involuntary pair. The very idea of the involuntary, it will turn out, is
dependent upon its being considered in relation to voluntary action.
Otherwise we end up trying to conceive of something beyond our
experience that is unnamable. If we can in fact call it the involuntary,
it is because we already presuppose our lived experience of what
Ricoeur calls the voluntary. As he puts it, 'If the so-called elements
of mental life are not intelligible in themselves, we can find no
meaning in a purported primitive automatic behavior from which
voluntary spontaneity could be derived by secondary complication,
flexibility or correction' (FN, 5-6). .,
Pure description of the reciprocity of the voluntary and the irl'vol-
untary also requires setting out of play any pathological forms of
the phenomena in question. This is why Ricoeur will leave the
question of evil, in the sense of a misuse of our freedom, for a pro-
jected second volume of his project. Similarly, whatever it is that
responds to the problem of evil, what, following Jaspers, Ricoeur
calls Transcendence, has to be left for a proposed third volume, one
that was meant to follow the introduction of the problem of evil
into the discussion of the general problem of freedom and nature.
But, as we shall see, this volume was never written.
Finally, Ricoeur already notes that such attempted pure descrip-
tion will leave something out, 'a residuum', whose consequences will
have to be considered. In a way, this residuum is also what the empir-
ical sciences deal with. This is why Ricoeur's attempted phenome-
nology is attentive to empirical psychology as he knew it at the time.
His claim is that 'vestiges of a phenomenology' (FN, 13) can be
found in it through what he will call a diagnostic approach to its
data.
In the end, what he discovers is that all attempts to articulate fully
the relation between the voluntary and involuntary become 'stymied
in an invincible confusion' (FN, 13) that we can call a mystery (fol-
lowing Marcel) or a paradox (following Jaspers). Indeed, 'there is no
system of nature and freedom' (FN, 19, original emphasis). This is
important because philosophies based on the cogito tend to think of
13
it as positing itself, but according to Ricoeur this means ignoring the
lived body by treating it as one object among others, and not as
something given as soon as we begin to think. Therefore something
more than phenomenological description will be required to make
sense of the relation of freedom and nature; in fact, to deal with this,
something more than a simple change of method will be required.
As Ricoeur can already put it here: 'the Ego must more radically
renounce the covert claim of all consciousness, must abandon its
wish to posit itself, so that it can receive the nourishing and inspir-
ing spontaneity which breaks the sterile circle of the self's constant
return to itself' (FN, 14).4 This critique of the self-positing ego will
be a thread that runs throughout Ricoeur's subsequent philosophy.
A final point that needs to be noted here is what Ricoeur says
about the limits of philosophy as a pure conceptual system, another
thread that runs through his work, and leads to his critique of
Hegel's philosophy as tempting but ultimately not acceptable. As he
can already put it in this early work: concepts 'are indications of
a lived experience in which we are submerged more than signs of
mastery which our intelligence exercises over our human condition'
(FN, 17, original emphasis). Yet at the same time, he will hold that
'it is the task of philosophy to clarify existence itself by use of con-
cepts' (ibid.). This is what he is proposing to do ill' this first volume
of this proposed three-volume study.
MAKING SENSE OF HUMAN ACTION
Ricoeur's first step is to consider deciding in distinction from volun-
tary motion. What separates them is not a temporal but a concep-
tual interval. What we decide upon is a project, although this project
also needs to be put to the test of whether it can be or is carried out.
In this sense, deciding is a capacity, a notion that will playa much
wider role in Ricoeur's late work where he will move beyond the
question of freedom to consider the self as the capable human being
in a much broader sense, albeit one still closely linked to the ques-
tion of action. For what makes an action voluntary and character-
izes any decision, is that it includes an intention 'that could be
affirmed after the fact as a potential project of a postponed action'
(FN, 41). What is fundamentally at stake here therefore is the claim
that the project might not be carried out, but in any case it 'appears
to be within the power of its author' As such, a decision can be
14
FREEDOM AND NATURE
conceived of as both a thought (of what is to be done) and ajudge-
ment (to do it). A decision, therefore, is like an event in the sense that
it comes down to taking a position - so be it! It is not a whim or a
command, but is the act of someone, hence a personal act. 'Hence
its existential import is considerable: it is 1 who project and do some-
thing in projecting or doing something' (FN, 48). Next, a decision
looks to, projects a future. This means that it is characterized by a
certain expectation, not so much of the yet to come as of the future
perfect, of what will have come. As such the future and time
in general - is a condition of action, even though our attempt to
describe the voluntary slices it into different, timeless moments.
Finally, as already stated, a decision is a capability. Here Ricoeur
adopts the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty's argument
that our most basic lived experience is that of a lived conviction that
'I can' This way of speaking not only expresses this capability; it
links it to something more basic than itself. Even at this most ~ s i
level, though, Ricoeur notes that there is a reflexive aspect to every
decision: 1 make up my own mind to do something.
5
This is not some-
thing 1 observe, but something 1 do, hence it stands at the limit of the
subject-object model, although it carries within itself 'a vague aware-
ness of the subject pole' (FN, 60), which is why we can reflect upon"
it. One way we do this is through language. We can think and say, 'it
is I who At the same time, we can also see that not all decisions
need to be explicitly reflected upon or brought to language, although
we may do that after the fact when we realize what we have done.
6
This phenomenology of deciding leads next to the question of
motivation. 'There are no decisions without motives' (FN, 66). The
obvious question is whether such motives are causes. Ricoeur holds
that in terms of their basic meaning they are not. Causes can be
known and understood prior to their effects. This is not true for
motives. That is, a motive only makes sense, only has a meaning in
relation to a decision. We cannot even begin to talk about a motive
apart from some decision, and any decision makes possible ques-
tions about its possible motives. Hence their relation is reciprocal. As
Ricoeur puts it, a motive 'determines the will only as the will deter-
mines itself' (FN, 67). Motives, therefore, operate more on the level
of meaning than of natural causes. They can thus be said to provide
a basis for, a way to justify, to legitimate decisions. Ricoeur's con-
clusion is that all that we can say if the question is 'are motives at all
like causes?' is that they incline without compelling.
15
A second aspect of the phenomenology of motives has to do with
their relation to values. That is, there is an implicit sense of evalua-
tion in any motive. One conclusion Ricoeur draws here is that values
first appear to us as possible motives for decisions. This suggests that
there is an ethical dimension always implicit in or bordering on
human action, although Ricoeur does not develop this point in
depth at this time. Instead, he moves on to say that the major point
here is that willing as deciding is never a pure act on our part: 'I do
my acts to the extent to which I accept reasons for them' (FN, 78).
Hence, there is always also a receptive moment in all voluntary
action, something we often express through metaphors: we open
ourselves to or close ourselves off from; we turn toward, adopt,
adhere to. Again, these are all things we can think and talk about,
particularly when they are marked by a feeling of responsibility,
something emphasized whenever we say that something is my act.
7
Ricoeur is now ready to introduce the involuntary in terms of my
body as 'the most basic source' of my motives and as revealing 'a pri-
mordial stratum of motives: the organic values' (FN, 85). His claim
is that the involuntary is 'for the will' and the will 'is by reason of the
involuntary' What he means is that while the higher cannot be
explained by the lower, there is also always something opaque about
the bodily involuntary that will resist pure description and even lan-
guage because experience always involves more than cognitive
understanding. The best we can do is to wager that we can make
sense of what is at issue here through use of the already mentioned
diagnostic relation between objective knowledge of the body and
our lived experience.
The first way Ricoeur seeks to do this is through a discussion of
need and pleasure. In the most abstract sense need relates to a living
organism's need to appropriate and assimilate things, say food, in
order to exist. Thus needs should not be reduced to just an inner sen-
sation. They refer to something other than myself, and thus have a
kind of intentional relation to something other than themselves,
at the same time that they are experienced as referring to some-
thing that I lack. This experienced lack is also characterized by an
impetus, a drive to remove it. This is why some needs can be experi-
enced as painful and why any need can overlap with the question of
motives for action. But as such, needs are also something I can resist
or even reject. 'Though I am not the master of need in the sense
of lack, I can reject it as a reason for action' (FN, 93). To cite an
16
FREEDOM AND NATURE
example, I can choose whether to eat if food is available; I do not
choose whether to be hungry. Needs thus are not just one motive
among others; they especially connect us to our embodied existence.
What is noteworthy here, especially for later developments in
Ricoeur's philosophy, is that when needs connect with possible
motives, we can represent them to ourselves in terms of particular
objects. This raises the question of the role of the imagination. This
topic occurs again and again in Ricoeur's philosophy, although he
never published a specific work dealing with it.
8
Here, though,
we can say that imagination provides another link to time in that
through our imagination we can anticipate something that might be
'as something currently absent at the basis of the world' (FN, 97).
Imagination thus links up with the affective dimension connected
with the basic idea of a project, and many if not all of our projects
carry an affective overtone of some concern. At the same time, a
door is opened to the possible limit case of becoming fascinateg with
our concern to the point of being ensnared by it, something thf5.t will
become important when the question of evil comes on the scene.
9
Here, however, the discussion of imagination stays closer to the level
of something like pure knowledge.
Pleasure as something we both can anticipate and imagine is also
worth considering, if only because it indicates something about the
nature of desire beyond the level of basic needs. 'Desire is the present
experience of need as a lack and as urge, extended by the represen-
tation of the absent object and by anticipation of pleasure' (FN,
101). What is interesting here is again the reference to the future. The
pleasure I experience is as much something I anticipate as something
I currently feel. This is because pleasure is tied to the idea of value.
'To anticipate a pleasure means to be ready to say, "this is good" ,
(FN, 102). But here again we may deceive ourselves, yielding to the
temptation or fascination that goes beyond or misconstrues our
actual needs or good. But to pursue this at this point would be to go
beyond the brackets imposed by the attempt at pure description. All
Ricoeur can say at this point is that pleasure in relation to the imag-
ination may be an invitation to the fault. Instead of pursuing this
possibility, however, he next offers some more general comments on
how motives and values relate to the organic level of our lives. For
example, pain is not the opposite of pleasure, but something hetero-
geneous with it. Similarly, what is difficult, and thus not always plea-
surable, may have a positive value in the way that it relates to a freely
17
chosen action. Finally, we must say that what we find in relation to
organic life is a plurality of values, some of which are discordant
with others. Hence there is something ambiguous about organic life
that will resist all our attempts to make complete sense of it - for
example, by trying to organize such discordant values into a single
hierarchy.
One important conclusion here is that as affectivity 'bodily exis-
tence transcends the intelligibility claimed by the essences of the
cogito' (FN, 120). Therefore any attempt to think of a simple will to
live as ultimately constitutive of our lives will always run into
difficulties, if only because even the organic values we consider are
themselves subject to change over time and place. 'Life, at least on
the human level, is a complex, unresolved situation, an unresolved
problem whose terms are neither clear nor consistent' (ibid.). In
other words, what the phenomenology of the voluntary and invol-
untary tells us is why we have to make choices not how we make
them. We make them because we are both subject and object,
without being able to reconcile these two ways of being completely.
Beyond this, we also have to recognize that such choices are situated
with regard to time and place and will have to be understood in ways
that acknowledge this.
Returning to the side of the voluntary, and irtorder to deepen this
description of decisions, Ricoeur turns next to what he calls the
history of decision making as a movement from hesitation to actual
choice. There is something dramatic about this history. 'Existence
moves forward only through the double movement of corporeal
spontaneity and voluntary control. This process has two aspects: it
is both undergone and carried out' (FN, 136). Here is where we find
the tension between continuity and discontinuity already referred to
above. The 'let it be so' of choice introduces a discontinuity into this
history, where our hesitation had already suggested a capacity for
such a choice, and where the choice made cuts off the hesitation at
the same time that it fulfils it. Many factors are at play here: the kind
of confusion that comes from bodily existence, the values that may
be in play, the realization of our finitude indicated by our mortality,
the attention we may pay to all these factors. Ricoeur's working
hypothesis is that 'the power of stopping the debate is none other
than the power of conducting it and that this control over the suc-
cession' is what we mean by our ability to pay attention to it and
determine it as some outcome (FN, 149). Again, imagination may
18
FREEDOM AND NATURE
playa role here, and there is no reason to think that this is necessar-
ily a completely rational process, although the process may involve
deliberation. Its conclusion in any case is a decision, even when it is
one not to decide.
Decisions can be a source of novelty. 'The event of choice always
permits two readings: on the one hand, it is tied to the preceding
examination whose end or, more exactly, resolution it is; on the other
hand, it genuinely inaugurates the project as a simple intention of
future action' (FN, 164). Paradoxically, it is our attending to the
process of reaching a decision that resolves this process by identify-
ing it. This is why we can never fully reconcile the two readings just
referred to. We can see this once we recognize that, on the one side,
hesitation plays with different possibilities and reasons for acting,
yet these reasons only become operative once our choice is made,
without that choice being able to be conceived of as completely
unmotivated. Therefore there is good reason to introduce a ce.rtain
indetermination into our definition of freedom, although this s6:ould
not be thought of as an indetermination of indifference. The problem
is how we are to make sense of the claim that to decide and to choose
and to be undetermined are one and the same thing. This is where
the eidetic tips over into the existential and calls for a different
approach, one that Ricoeur announced at the time as a poetics of the
will which could only come after passing through the pro blem of the
fault, of evil. All he will say about it at this point is that if something
like an ontology, a theory of the nature of ultimate reality, is opera-
tive here, it is a regional one, not one that can claim to be universally
exhaustive.
Decisions, then, do not make up the whole of voluntary action;
they are just one aspect of them. They have to be put to the test of
being carried out if the power of decision is itself a capacity to set
things in motion. Again, Ricoeur's phenomenological approach will
try to isolate this phenomenon as much as possible in order to
capture something like its essence. Most acts are done as soon as we
think of them, but action can also be delayed. But if a project is
never attempted there is something mistaken about calling it action.
In this sense, there is a basic value operative in action in that willed
acts refer to something that ought-to-be. But as stated, 'moving and
deciding can be distinguished only in abstraction: the project
anticipates the action and the action tests the project' (FN, 202). A
basic insight here is that this level again brings the body into play,
19
along with perhaps the imagination, but it is the body as an organ of
action more than itself being the end of action that is in question.
What is at stake is something like what we can call effort, both as
regards trying to carry through on our decision by means of our
body, and even in representing this to ourselves as something desir-
able: 'I cannot represent the content of the value to myself unless I
master the movement of the body and the movement of the idea.
The first function takes place in the register of practical representa-
tion, the second constitutes the original relation of willing to reality
which is acting strictly speaking' (FN, 204, original emphasis).
This is obviously not easy to describe and Ricoeur considers a
number of different phenomena in trying to explicate it. Many of
them present themselves as obstacles to description as much as they
advance its progress. For example, that actions are events tends to
emphasize the present moment of their occurrence as much as the
process that is the setting into motion of our decisions. There is a
mixture of happening and doing at play here. Secondly, there is the
question of whether we can make sense of the object of acting in
terms of the phenomenological i\fea of intentionality. That is, what
is at issue is not just that I intend to do something in the sense of
willing it, but also in the sense that in willing it, lrefer to something,
my project or act, which we can identify and name. This intended
'object' is not always clearly given; certainly it does not appear in the
same way as does an object of perception or even of knowledge; in
fact, it comes close to evoking something like a non-representative
consciousness, one that Ricoeur tries to capture by calling this inten-
ded object the 'pragma' of acting. That this term is not very satis-
factory is evident from the fact that it disappears from his later work,
but the problem is a real one and is connected to the notion of con-
sciousness as somehow involving representations, a problem that
will continue to show up in Ricoeur's later work, until he finally con-
cludes that it is not a helpful way to approach things after all and
simply needs to be abandoned.
lo
The body is the organ of our acting more than it is its object. How,
then, do we make sense of our experience of moving our body? This
must be, first of all, a capacity we possess, hence something poten-
tial. But it is also a capacity we come to recognize through using it.
In this sense, 'capacities are at the same time residues of action and
promises of action' (FN, 215). A striking case here is that these
capacities are not something we have to think of in order to use
20
FREEDOM AND NATURE
them, although we can reflect upon them. To put it another way, they
are not things that we observe, unlike objects of perception. Here,
Ricoeur again sees something that resists any reduction to disem-
bodied consciousness. 'Cartesian dualism cannot be overcome as
long as we assign thought (project, idea, motive, image, etc.) to sub-
jectivity and movement to objectivity.' The question therefore is how
to reintroduce the body into the cogito 'as a whole and to recover the
fundamental certitude of being incarnate, of being in a corporeal sit-
uation' (FN, 217). This is a question that will involve language, a
language where thought and movement would be homogeneous
categories.
Here the idea of a diagnostic approach comes into play. Applying
it to both Gestalt and Behaviourist psychology, Ricoeur argues that
they both end up trying to objectify the ego in just the way he is
arguing finally cannot be done. Yet they do suggest a helpful way of
thinking about voluntary motion and embodiment as a 'dramatic'
relationship in that they show that 'every voluntary hold on the ~ d y
repossesses the body's involuntary usage' (FN, 227). By this, Ricoeur
means that voluntary motion is not simply given; it is something
we learn to do through something like a dialogue with our body.
He seeks to confirm this by considering three relevant examples: pre-
formed skills, emotions and habits.
Preformed skills (such as our ability to stand upright) refer to
something prior to reflexes but neither are they instincts. Rather they
refer to 'a primitive pattern of behavior of our body in relation to
perceived objects' (FN, 232). They regulate movement but do not
produce it. Next, emotions presuppose a more or less implicit moti-
vation that precedes and sustains them. As such they give an added
physical aspect to already conscious ends, one that points to a
nascent movement. Hence they are more basic than acquired habits.
Ricoeur further suggests that we can identify what he calls basic emo-
tional attitudes such as wonder or shock, or joy and sorrow, which
can be elaborated by our affective imagination and culminate in
desire, thereby 'echoing and amplifying in the body a rapid, implicit
value judgment' (FN, 256). As such, the phenomenology of emotions
suggests that 'for the idea of a spontaneity of consciousness we
have to substitute the idea of a "passion" of the soul from the fact of
the body' (FN, 275) wherever there is a possible action. This, in turn,
implies that 'willing only moves on the condition of being moved'
(FN, 276). Consciousness, therefore, can already be seen to have the
21
capability to bind itself, in the sense of making itself the prisoner of
imaginary evils, or even of what is really nothing at all, something we
call vanity. At the same time, emotions are not mere reflexes; they are
partly subject to our giving them meaning and responding to them,
which is already a kind of wisdom.
Habits like emotions represent an alteration of our intentions.
They have been learned or acquired and relate to how we act. As
learned, they build on our preformed skills, not our reflexes, and
have use-values. Furthermore, they have a specific kind of spon-
taneity associated with them indicated by our familiar gestures and
even customary thoughts. We can say that they give a form to our
sources of action, but they are not precisely willed, although we can
make an effort to change them. At one extreme, they become auto-
matic, tending to reduce our willing to zero; at the other, they enable
action in that they give it a form or pattern through which to express
itself. Combined with preformed skills and emotions, habits help us
make sense of what it means to put our decisions into motion, some-
thing we again see takes effort.
Effort, first of all, has a sensory aspect, although we only really
become aware of this through reflection. Ordinary actions are things
we just do, but sometimes we encounter resistance either from our
body or from the world that we can focus our consciousness on. In
such cases the body is no longer a docile organ of action and we no
longer experience ourselves as a simple unity, an experience that
in extreme cases can turn into something like vertigo. Yet we can
encounter resistance to our projects only because we can say yes to
them. This is why there is a kind of joy in acting when it succeeds,
when our voluntary initiative carries over into what we can call a
motor intentionality that connects our lived body and our acts as
put into motion. This motor intentionality is transitive; it does not
terminate in the body but reaches out to the world in a way that
differs from seeing or hearing. In both cases, though, the world is
experienced as there for us. This 'there for us' of the world Ricoeur
says is a mystery in the sense intended by Gabriel Marcel, who dis-
tinguishes between a problem, which is something to be solved and
that can be solved, and a mystery which is something that can only
be acknowledged and marvelled at. This is why Ricoeur will always
maintain that something is given to us and that the problem of the
truth of reality cannot be answered solely through a consideration
of our will or our reflective consciousness.
22
FREEDOM AND NATURE
Once we reach the stage of movement a new factor emerges that
Ricoeur calls consent: 'consenting is the act of the will which acqui-
esces to a necessity' (FN, 341). He considers it in term of three forms
of the involuntary that move us from something like a relative to an
absolute involuntary: character, the unconscious, and life itself. As
such, consent is not just a judgement; it is a constitutive part of
human freedom given the reciprocity of the voluntary and the invol-
untary. It involves a form of patience before what we cannot change,
but also puts the stamp of effectiveness on what we can do, thereby
legitimating our choices. In a striking phrase, Ricoeur says that
'consent is the asymptotic progress of freedom towards necessity'
(FN, 346), reuniting us with nature. This is not easy to make sense
of given the subject-object model. How can these two terms be
reunited? How can we finally say that there is no incompatibility
between them? Or that all forms of freedom finally agree with one
another? This is what a philosophy of the voluntary and involuntary
seeks to resolve, even if it itself does so only asymptotically. Thaf is,
this philosophy can get closer and closer to such a resolution, but
Ricoeur does not think it can ever attain it given our finite, embod-
ied human existence in a world we did not make. This is why concil-
iation will always be incomplete, if only because there is an inherent
ambiguity in the idea of necessity, one that points to both a condi-
tion of our existence and its limit. Still, Ricoeur maintains, 'the yes
of consent is always won from the no' and this cannot be denied by
attempts to objectify everything (FN, 354).
This, however, is a victory for reflection, but not yet one for exis-
tence. More needs to be said about the negative moment through
which freedom and necessity negate each other. Unlike Sartre,
Ricoeur refuses to consider freedom to be the sole source of negation
'as if freedom were brought about by nothingness, by the very act in
which it breaks away from the blind innocence of life' (FN, 445).11
Rather negation has to be seen as both positive and negative. It is inju-
rious in that it appears as an active negation of freedom, positive in
that it is freedom's response to the 'no' of necessity. After all, 'freedom
is the possibility of not accepting myself' (ibid.) and philosophy has
also to make sense of this. This question of determining who I am,
my self, will become a constant theme of Ricoeur's philosophy, in the
sense that negation is something we can hope to overcome. To fill out
this claim, Ricoeur here considers our experience of necessity in terms
of three moments. The first such moment is what he calls 'the sorrow
23
of finitude' We suffer from our finitude when we realize that we rep-
resent only one perspective on the world and values. Similarly, we can
suffer from having to make choices, which not only emphasize our
particularity but also remove us from other possibilities. With this
comes the second moment, the 'sorrow of formlessness' There is
something about us that we do not choose yet that affects us, some-
thing we can try to give form to by calling it the unconscious, 'the
spontaneous power of unrecognized tendencies' in us (FN, 449).12
Finally, there is the 'sorrow of contingency' I did not choose to come
into existence, to live. As Heidegger says, we are 'thrown' into exis-
tence and into the world, and with it into a space and time that
extends between birth and death. But, unlike Heidegger, Ricoeur does
not define existence in terms of its being toward death. Yes, death rep-
resents 'an irrecusable necessity', but 'this necessity cannot be
deduced from any characteristic of existence. Contingency tells me
only that I am not a necessary being whose contradiction would imply
a self-contradiction; it allows me to conclude at most that I can not-
be one day, that I can die - for what must begin can end - but not that
I must die' (FN, 458, original emphasis). Once the idea that I will die
is gained, however, the sorrow, and perhaps also the anticipation,
increases. Yet freedom responds to this 'no' of our existential condi-
tion with the 'no' of refusal.
This is most clearly seen in its most exaggerated forms: a wish for
totality, for complete self-transparency, and in our desire to say that
we in fact posit ourselves in positing our consciousness. But 'any
ideal derivation of consciousness is a refusal of its concrete condi-
tion' (FN, 465, original emphasis) - freedom's no, in other words,
can turn into a form of vanity. Ricoeur's conclusion is that consent
is not a way of refusing necessity but rather of transcending it, par-
ticularly as regards evil, through a poetic response rooted in hope.
Ricoeur considers two opposed, imperfect forms of alleged consent
here to give some content to this idea of hope: one is Stoicism, which
is an effort at detachment rather than conciliation; the other Ricoeur
calls Orphism or the hyperbolic consent represented by Nietzsche
and much of Rilke's poetry, a kind of dancing over the abyss. Hope
lies between these polar extremes of exile and confusion and sustains
us in that it allows us to hope that we at least are on the way to con-
ciliation.
Ricoeur's conclusion to this first of his projected three volumes
therefore is that there is ultimately something radically paradoxical
24
FREEDOM AND NATURE
about human freedom: 'in reality each moment of freedom - decid-
ing, moving, consenting - unites action and passion, initiative and
receptivity, according to a different intentional mode' (FN, 483). The
paradox lies not between these moments but between the forms of
initiative and receptivity that characterize each of them. What it
reveals is that our freedom is 'only human' and that we can under-
stand it only in terms of certain limit concepts that function like reg-
ulative, not constitutive ideas. First of all, our freedom is not creative
like divine freedom; we are not God. Secondly, ours is a motivated
freedom but not in an exhaustive, transparent, absolutely rational
way. Thirdly, it is an incarnate freedom, albeit one capable of grace-
ful acts. Finally, there is the idea of a fully human freedom, one that
would not be limited by the idea of a given fixed character, hence of
a particular finite form. 'These limit concepts have no other function
here than to help us to understand the condition of a will which
is reciprocal with an involuntary' (FN, 486); as such they still belong
to the level of an attempted description of lived subjectivity. wWat
they teach us is that human freedom is not divine; it does not posit
itself because it is not Transcendence: 'to will is not to create'
INTRODUCING THE FAULT
A decade was to pass between the time Ricoeur published Freedom
and Nature and the appearance of the next of his proposed three
volumes on this topic. Whereas the initial volume was presented as
drawing on something like a pure description of the reciprocal rela-
tions between the voluntary and the involuntary, this next step was
to be more empirical in that it would take into account the existence
of evil - what Ricoeur labelled the Fault - as something actually
existing but not required by the essential structures approximated in
the first volume. But when this next part appeared, it was obvious
that something had changed in Ricoeur's thinking regarding what he
had earlier called his 'empirics' of the will. Two books, not just one,
appeared. Ricoeur had come to realize that introducing the Fault
called not only for a new method but also for a new working hypoth-
esis. He now realized that the passage from the innocence of the
essential structures that characterized the reciprocity of the volun-
tary and the involuntary to the actual existence of evil could not be
directly accounted for phenomenologically or even empirically. If
the existence of evil is in fact irrational, the usual rational methods
25
will be inadequate to account for it. Another approach is required,
one that will approach the transition to the actual existence of the
fault from two sides, so to speak, through what he now called a 'con-
crete mythics' This is the way to proceed because myths are how
people, in fact, do speak of the beginning and end of evil. Therefore
philosophy has to find a way to take this use of language up into its
rational discourse.
What Ricoeur now proposed was that this return to philosophical
discourse would itself require three books, which then would be fol-
lowed by his proposed poetics of the will. But only two of these three
books actually appeared: Fallible Man and The Symbolism of Evil
(which could have been translated as The Symbolics of Evil in order
to capture the sense of an organized structure rather than the sug-
gestion that what we find there is simply a consideration of isolated
symbols). The first of these books comes at the existence of the Fault
from the side of its possibility, which is not the same thing as either
its necessity or reality; the second begins from how people in fact do
talk about it as already existing. They were to have been followed by
a third book that would address the question how philosophy could
advance starting from the symbolic language that characterizes the
symbols and myths dealing with the origin and end of evil. This pro-
jected volume would address areas within what the French call
the human sciences, as well as take up the question of speculative
thought and a possible ethical worldview on that basis. More specif-
ically, Ricoeur envisaged discussing psychoanalysis, criminology and
contemporary penal theory, and political philosophy, including the
problem of alienation, on the basis of the two books we are about to
consider in order to find a speculative equivalent of the mythical
themes discovered in The Symbolism of Evil. He never explained why
this particular volume was not written, although he would go on to
write a big book on Freud and all the other topics do appear in his
later work. What we do have in the two volumes that were published,
however, is quite fascinating and sets the question that will determine
much of his subsequent work: how do we take seriously symbols and
myths - or, as we shall see, figurative uses of language?
THE POSSIBILITY OF THE FAULT
Fallible Man sets out to make rationally plausible the possibility of
the fault through the concept of fallibility. It does so by seeking to
26
FREEDOM AND NATURE
show that this concept 'designates a characteristic of man's exis-
tence' (FM, 2). Something important happens here as regards
Ricoeur's overall philosophy, although it may not have been clear to
the first readers of this work. His philosophical problem is beginning
to expand beyond the problem of human freedom in relation
to nature toward a philosophical anthropology, a philosophical
account of what it is to be human, albeit one that still keeps its focus
on human agency more than on cognition. This philosophical
anthropology will later become the question of what Ricoeur will
call the capable human being who is a social being and lives in a
world organized by social institutions. Here, though, this anthropo-
logical understanding of the human condition gets expressed in
terms of what Ricoeur cans the 'pathetique de misere' that charac-
terizes the human condition as one in which a human being does not
completely coincide with him- or herself. This formula is not easy to
translate into English. By 'pathetique' Ricoeur means that what is at
issue is something we undergo as much as we bring it about, s ~
thing we suffer, jf you will, where the 'que' ending again conveys
something like a structural condition beyond the more feeling-
oriented tone of simply saying 'pathos' 'Misere' in turn could as well
have been translated as impoverishment, destitution or wretched-
ness rather than calqued as 'misery', for Ricoeur's argument will be
that there is a kind of disproportion to human existence, a dispro-
portion that can best be expressed by the tension between our par-
ticularity and our ability to transcend our particular points of view.
In Cartesian terms, it is a tension between the finite and the infinite
as expressed by the particularity of our perception and the apparent
universality of what we label as knowledge.
Ricoeur's case depends on showing that human beings exist as
'bringing about mediations between all the modalities and all the
levels of reality' within themselves and outside themselves (FM, 3),
where this can best be demonstrated by drawing not on Descartes
but on Kant, Hegel and Husser! to make use of what they respec-
tively offer as the transcendental synthesis of the imagination, the
dialectic between certainty and truth, and the dialectic of intention
and intuition. In choosing this approach, Ricoeur takes a certain
distance from other philosophers of that day whom he sees as focus-
ing only on the finite aspect of human existence. His question
instead is whether the kind of transcendence humans can accom-
plish is limited to transcendence of their finitude in reaching things
27
outside them in the world or whether it might not also relate to what
he meant to present as the Transcendence that was to answer
the problem of the Fault in the never published third volume of his
Freedom and Nature project. All he will propose at this point,
though, is the suggestion that the infinitude that humans can reach
in their everyday lives may not exhaust the idea of the infinite as it
relates to this other sense of transcendence.
If we were to characterize Fallible Man in relation to the history of
philosophy, it stands closest to the kind of transcendental style of
reflection associated with Kant. That is, what is at issue is finding the
conditions of possibility that make the Fault possible - the possible
(and apparently inevitable) misuse of human freedom for wrong or
destructive ends. But Fallible Man is not merely an example of tran-
scendental reflection in a Kantian mode, for Ricoeur sees that he will
also need to fill in the gap between the lived pathos of actual exis-
tence and the more abstract transcendental concept of the idea of fal-
libility. It is a question, in other words, of attempting to reconcile our
feeling (or what Kant calls 'sensibility') and our thought, a limit that
is never quite reached but that Ricoeur seeks to make intelligible.
An important aspect in how he proceeds to do this will character-
ize much of his subsequent work. This is that he begins by drawing
on the history of philosophy, particularly Plato and Pascal, in order
to justify his own reference to the destitution of the human condition
rather than simply asserting or assuming it. By showing that this
basic starting point is already implicit in the history of philosophy
and continuous with it, he means to justify taking up the challenge
of understanding fallibility through the kind of pure reflection that
characterizes philosophy, where such reflection will at least be able to
move beyond the vagueness of the idea of 'impoverishment' to iden-
tify its distinctive forms.
Such reflection has to begin from the side of the things we experi-
ence, not from introspection. It leads to insight into the specific dis-
proportion that characterizes our knowledge of our lived condition.
What it discovers is iliat our awareness of this is the product of a
synthesis of our finite perspective on the world and 'the infinitude
characteristic of determining, of saying, and intending' (FM, 19).
Ricoeur means by this that while we see things only from a certain
point of view, we think them from what Thomas Nagel has more
recently called a 'view from nowhere' The known object is an object
for anyone at any place at any time. But as already stated, this anyone
28
FREEDOM AND NATURE
who is the knower is no one in particular, so the question will be how
to move from this cognitive synthetic consciousness to the question
of the self-consciousness of any actually existing individual. As
Ricoeur says, my 'point of view is the ineluctable initial narrowness
of my openness to the world' (PM, 23), such that this opening on
things is always at the same time a closure within openness, some-
thing that can even be experienced as a form of fate.
We get beyond anyone point of view first by our embodied ability
to move about, to change perspective, but this only brings us to
another perspective. We get beyond these different perspectives, in
turn, by recognizing and naming them as perspectives, hence by
bringing them to language. Paradoxically, in recognizing and refer-
ring to ourselves as a finite perspective on things, we transcend our
finitude because the meaning of what is identified or spoken of as an
object goes beyond any perspective on it.
13
Language, we can thus
say, gives perception meaning through a kind of dialectical relatio*
to it. That is, we know perspective because we can name and com-
municate about it, but we have something to name and communicate
about only because of our perception from some perspective. It is
the moment of affirmation or judgement about the object in ques-
tion that indicates the move from perception to signification: 'that is
what it is!' For Ricoeur, such an affirmation or judgement already
involves a nascent reflection, for it is always someone who affirms
something as what it is, something other than him- or herself, point-
ing to the subsequent question: who is it who does this?
This dialectic of finite and infinite perspective therefore depends
on a more fundamental dialectic of speaking as doing and perceiv-
ing as receiving, which again brings into play the ideas of the will
that affirms and the consent to the ways things are or can be known
to be. Obviously, the question of the relation of truth to language is
implicit and unavoidable here, although not taken up in detail.
Ricoeur's question, rather, is about the third, middle term that lies
between the poles of these two dialectics, that of the finite and infi-
nite, and that of receiving and doing. He says that this middle term
is not something that is ever given in itself but rather is an awareness
that is only reachable in referring to the thing affirmed: 'here con-
sciousness is nothing else than that which stipulates that a thing is a
thing only if it is in accordance with this synthetic constitution, if it
can appear and be expressed, if it can affect me in my finitude and
lend itself to the discourse of any rational being' (FM, 38).
29
His next question is whether we can discover what makes this
synthesis 'on the thing' possible, a question that introduces the prop-
erly transcendental moment of reflection aimed at conditions of
possibility. Following Kant, he begins by saying that this synthesis
depends on a 'representation' where this representation is the result
of what Kant called the transcendental schema through which our
imagination gives an image to our concepts. Ricoeur agrees with
Kant that this schematism is 'an art concealed in the depths of the
human soul, whose real modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever
to allow us to discover, and to have open to our gaze' 14 The idea of
a transcendental synthesis, therefore, is not fully adequate to explain
what is at stake in the disproportion constitutive of the human con-
dition. It gives us only consciousness in general as a possibility, but
as such, 'it remains deficient with respect to the substantial richness
of which myth and rhetoric give a pathetic understanding' (FM, 46).
This is why, still in a Kantian vein, Ricoeur turns next to the ques-
tion of a practical synthesis. This is a synthesis that goes beyond the
abstractness of the transcendental synthesis because it is motivated
by a concern for totality, that is, for an existence that will also include
the affective and practical dimensions of our existence. This sought-
for totality is once again not something given but rather a task to be
realized. At this new level, what was finite perspective on the first
level is now taken up as character and what was infinite in terms of
meaning falls under the heading of happiness. But once again, dis-
proportion characterizes the relationship between them.
Character brings into consideration the affective aspect of per-
spective, something that motivates our practical dispositions to act.
Happiness, in turn, introduces a new sense of receptivity, one that
indicates that our projects do not arise from nowhere or ex nihilo.
They add the thrust of desire to our representations of the things
before us, although there is always something opaque about this
affective relation to things. It is not perfectly clear, for example, why
we prefer some things and not others. Furthermore, we recognize an
experience of otherness through this affective desire that distin-
guishes us from the things of our desire and that in our attitudes
toward them we cannot completely account for, but which may be
said to introduce to our point of view the notion of a self-preference
or even, at the limit, a self-love. Character, we can say, therefore is
'the finite openness of my existence taken as a whole' (FM, 58). Yet,
because it is open to the world, it is open to what goes beyond itself,
30
FREEDOM AND NATURE
including the values of others, leading finally to the idea of human-
ity as something that we embody, albeit as seen from just one point
of view. Our character, too, then is something never fully seen in
itself. It is something that we 'read' and refer to indirectly, partly by
relating it to that feeling of otherness that makes us experience our-
selves as different from everyone else. Our character therefore is
experienced both as something given, again as something like fate,
but also as something liberating in that it moves us to act. At the
limit, it refers to the very fact that we exist and thus is not the result
of something we do, a fact that we grasp through our interaction
with others.
Happiness is the contrary term of the dialectic operative here. It
refers to the final aim of our concern for totality, for being a whole
person. As such, it serves as the horizon of our every point of view
and our every act. It is not just the sum of our acts, however; it is
intended to be a whole that is more than merely the sum of its parts,
The question is whether such happiness is or can be ever
reintroducing the question of disproportion, which is indicated by
the fact that our character always keeps us from realizing the entire
range of human possibility: 'Everything human ideas, beliefs,
values, signs, works, tools, institutions - is within my reach only in
accordance with the finite perspective of an absolutely individual
form of life' (FM, 67). Happiness, therefore, is our aim, and some-
times, maybe often, we feel we are on our way to it, but it is not
certain that we ever get beyond this feeling of being oriented to it.
What then can bring about the synthesis of character and happiness?
Ricoeur answers, again following Kant, that it is the self that is aimed
at through this synthesis, a self that is not necessarily the self we expe-
rience. This self is the person that we represent to ourselves as a
project to be realized, one whose actions would be congruent with its
existence. And it is on the basis of the idea of this person that we can
derive the idea of respect, both for ourselves and for others, but this
is a fragile synthesis in that it is difficult to carry out in practice. In
part, this is due to the fact that recognizing the idea of us as persons
worthy of respect rightly leads to self-esteem, but self-esteem when
combined with desire can overreach itself and destroy the synthesis
of character and happiness it is intended to unite. Furthermore, there
is always the possibility of discord within the affective synthesis that
seeks to reconcile character and happiness, a discord whose possibil-
ity has to be sought in the tension between our disposition toward
31
and aspiration for wholeness, without giving into what Kant called
a theory of radical evil as something constitutive of the human con-
dition. This understanding of evil was something Kant himself
rejected, but it left him having to say that reason could only recognize
the origin of evil as inscrutable.
Ricoeur's next question is to consider just when the disproportion
of human existence becomes 'pathetic', the moment when the
concept of fallibility links up with the lived experience of an impov-
erished or wretched existence that does not actually fulfil its promise.
As a first approximation to this moment, he returns to the connec-
tion between knowing and feeling as it involves degrees of feeling,
where feeling itself, like knowledge, is intentional in that it refers to
something other than itself. Whereas knowledge sets up a cleavage
between the knowing subject and the known object, feeling 'restores
our complicity with the world, our inherence in and belonging to it,
something more profound than all polarity and duality' (FM, 87).
Philosophical reflection can talk about this, but never quite really
capture it experientially or 'know' it except indirectly, leading many
philosophers mistakenly to reduce feeling to something merely sub-
jective or at best having to do with 'values' that themselves are sub-
jective and not objective. Feeling, instead, is like knowing, but also
different from it, pointing to something like an inner conflict within
ourselves. Here is where degrees of feeling come into play, running
from love of the world through need to desire and introducing the
possible mistake of confusing pleasure with happiness. But plea-
sure is always finite, whereas the perfection of happiness is infinite
because it is meant to be all encompassing. But that we can mistake
pleasure for happiness, prefer it, already points to the possibility of
a bad choice and through it to evil. Indeed, while it may look as
though the origin of evil may lie more on the affective than on the
cognitive level, it is intimately intertwined with both of them.
Still it is feeling that best reveals fragility as always potentially
conflictual in that 'with feeling, the polemical duality of subjectivity
replies to the solid synthesis of objectivity' (FM, 107). This conflict
takes place between subjectivity and objectivity in what Ricoeur
calls the self 'constituted as different from natural beings and other
selves' (ibid.), where this difference is more fundamental and prior
to any self-preference that may make the self wicked. He therefore
seeks to characterize the boundary region that lies between this pri-
mordial innocent state and actual existence in terms of the classical
32
FREEDOM AND NATURE
discussion of the passions, as found, for example, in Plato, Aquinas,
Descartes, and even Kant. Drawing again especially on Kant, he
suggests seeing the passions themselves as encompassing an original
morally neutral sense and possible distortions linked to certain ways
of representing objectivity. In particular, he points to the passions
associated with having, power, and worth (avoir, pouvoir, vaZoir in
French) as being particularly revelatory in this regard insofar as they
apply to our relations both to ourselves and to other persons and
things. In their distorted forms, having seeks to ground itself on
what is 'mine', power on the ability to command others, and worth
through esteem overly dependent on the opinion of others rather
than derived from relations of mutual recognition and respect. The
problem of correctly determining whether it is a distorted passion or
combination of passions at work in any given situation only adds to
the difficulty. Ricoeur's conclusion is that there is something inher-
ently conflictual about being a self, a topic that will return again if;!.
Oneself as Another. Ii'
Here, though, his emphasis is on the concept of fallibility as
indicative of the possibility of evil as something inherent to the
human condition. It is not that human beings are finite and hence
always limited in some ways, but rather the fact that they do not
coincide with themselves is the problem: 'Between self-esteem and
vainglory there is the whole distance that separates the possibility of
evil and its advent' (FM, 125). All we can say is that this possibility
is inherent in the human condition. Yet we need also to acknowledge
that we can as much say yes to existence as make a hash of it. Beyond
this double affirmation, rational reflection cannot go.
THE REALITY OF THE FAULT
The reality of the fault therefore does not follow from its possibility.
Yet no one would deny that it exists. To account for this fact Ricoeur
again has to introduce another shift in method in his next book in
his Freedom and Nature project: The Symbolism of Evil. This change
in method will have a profound influence and a lasting effect on his
subsequent work. Initially, it will provide a way for him to take up
the problem of the fault starting from those myths and symbols by
which people speak of it through an effort to surprise the transition
to its existence 'in the act by "re-enacting" in ourselves the confes-
sion that the religious consciousness makes of it' (SE, 3). This new
33
method, therefore, is not the product of a fully worked-out theory of
interpretation, although Ricoeur already speaks of it as a hermeneu-
tic approach, but it will lead him to recognize that he needs to con-
sider the possibility of such a theory when he goes on to attempt to
build on the results of this volume. Nor is this new approach yet any-
thing we might call a philosophy of the fault; it is rather the means
to such an end. But neither is it a method that will begin from some-
thing like the doctrine of original sin as it appears in Christianity.
Instead, Ricoeur argues we have to move back from such reflective
expressions to the more spontaneous ones that underlie all such
speculation and any such formulation. 15 We do remain at the level of
a use of language, however, although since it is a use characterized
by myths and symbols, so extended initial reflection on how to
construe these categories is called for.
Myth as Ricoeur understands it is not simply to be defined as a
false story nor is it an explanation in the sense of modern science,
although it does contribute to our understanding through the
explanatory significance of its 'symbolic function' which uncovers
and even can be said to reveal now people have understood them-
selves to be bound to what they consider to be sacred. Neither is
every myth in question in this work, but only those that deal with the
existence of evil and something like the experiente of a confession
of sins. Moreover, Ricoeur acknowledges that he must confine him-
self to the cultural experience that arises out of the Greek and
Hebrew worlds, since he lacks competence beyond these limits. At
the same time, he adds, this perspective is a necessary starting point
today for anyone in the West who wants to move beyond these limits,
for even philosophers must start from somewhere. Hence, what is at
issue is the attempt to grasp or 're-enact' in thought an 'experience
made explicit by the myth' (SE, 7). This is an experience marked
strongly by an affective dimension, one that will finally be expressed
as a sense of guilt and through the confession of a guilty conscience.
But any such confession is itself based on more archaic understand-
ings of the fault. These are ones that express themselves through the
symbolic forms of defilement or stain and sin before becoming any-
thing like a reference to a guilty conscience. It is the movement from
these more archaic forms to the more reflective lived experience of
the fault that will be unfolded in The Symbolism of Evil. And as
Ricoeur notes in passing, it begins to look as though what we call
the self turns out to depend on such symbolism and constitutes itself
34
FREEDOM AND NATURE
through something like a spontaneous interpretation of it, a point
that anticipates his later return to the question of selfhood. Here,
however, his emphasis will still be on the fault on the way to think-
ing about Transcendence.
As regards his understanding of symbols as operative in this
project, it is again not a question of taking up every symbol but
rather of finding criteria that will allow us to grasp what is at stake
in all of them. One such criterion is that symbols, insofar as they
are operative at the limits of consciousness, occur on three levels:
the cosmic aspect of hierophanies or appearances of the sacred;
the oneiric level of dreams; and the poetic level of the imagination.
There is a directedness implicit in this list. We first read symbols on
the world, then inside ourselves, and finally through our poetic imag-
ination. At each of these levels there is something ultimately inex-
haustible and ineradicable about the symbols involved. All the
philosopher can say at this point is that this is because symbols are
closely bound to and dependent on life itself. 11
More can be .said about the structure of symbols, however. When
experienced, they are already signs, in the sense that they signify
something beyond themselves. What distinguishes them as signs is
that they do not signify just one thing but have a kind of double
intentionality; they always signify more than one thing at a time even
though there is always a primary or literal meaning to every symbol.
This double intentionality means that in some way symbols are
always opaque, if only because they are irreducible to univocal
terms. Ricoeur will subsequently emphasize that this means that
formal logic, which presupposes such univocity, and philosophical
techniques based on formal logic, will be inadequate to deal exhaus-
tively with what is operative in symbolic language. But here his focus
is on the tie between the primary and secondary meaning(s) of
symbols. We can approximate this tie by saying it is analogical but
not allegorical, where allegory already presupposes an interpreta-
tion of the symbolic meaning, which in its way is immediately sig-
nificant. Myths, we shall see, are how people use language to talk
about such symbols, so we can add that myths too for Ricoeur are
not allegories.
One result of these initial reflections is that Ricoeur sees that if
philosophy is to take the existence of the fault seriously, it will have
to recognize something that he already calls the 'fullness' of lan-
guage because symbolic language is found in every natural language.
35
This, too, will have important consequences for his later work when
he turns from symbols per se to a more general reflection on lan-
guage and its implications for his philosophical anthropology in that
this implies limits to any philosophical approach that confines itself
to considering language only in terms of what can be expressed as
abstract univocal logical propositions.
The symbolics of stain, sin and guilt repeats the movement from
the outside of the cosmic level to the more inward oneiric and imag-
inative levels of symbols associated with the Fault. For example, we
can say that defilement is more like something that happens to people
than something they deliberately bring about, which is why it resists
reflection regarding why it occurs: 'What resists reflection is the
idea of a quaSi-material something that infects as a sort of filth, that
harms by invisible properties, and that nevertheless works in the
manner of a force in the field of our undividedly psychic and cor-
poreal existence' (SE, 25-26). Defilement therefore represents a
stage in which no clear demarcation has yet been drawn between evil
and misfortune, but it does lead to a feeling of terror or dread asso-
ciated with the questions why did this happen and what, if anything,
can be done about it? If there is any felt sense of responsibility, it is
more closely tied to the sense of being somehow the victim of an act
of vengeance than the perpetrator of a misdeed,' We. can even think
of this as implying a lesser sense of moral worthiness on the victim's
part than will characterize a more developed guilty conscience. This
is why symbols of defilement are most often associated with purifi-
cation rituals and the symbolism of cleansing or washing, lustration,
and a vocabulary of purity and impurity.
Yet we can also see the beginnings of a move to confession at this
level, a shift marked by the suspicion that one must have done some-
thing to bring about such defilement. In turn, this inchoate confes-
sion leads to the demand for a just punishment, perhaps through
something approximating a law, even if it is still one of retribution.
What is at stake here is a demand for restoration to a prior integrity
that has been violated by the defilement, something that already
points to the possible hope that such integrity can be restored.
'Stain' in this sense is the first schema of evil.
With sin we move from the ideas of the pure and the impure to
those of piety and justice in that the symbolics of sin conveys the
idea of breaking a rule or law and doing so 'before God' This is still
a religious transgression more than an ethical one; 'it is not the
36
FREEDOM AND NATURE
transgression of an abstract rule - of a value - but the violation of
a personal bond' (SE, 53). It is this transgression that the prophet
condemns and prophesies against, revealing something like a hyper-
ethical dimension to the consciousness of evil in that he presents the
demand that God addresses to human beings as an infinite one. 'It
is this infinite demand that creates an unfathomable distance and
distress between God and man' (SE, 55), but also a tension between
attempting to obey specific, finite commandments and this infinite
demand, thereby intensifying the consciousness of sin. What the law
teaches is how one is a sinner, not that he or she is already one. This
introduces a new feeling tone, one of anxiety rather than sheer
terror, a feeling that can come to characterize all our relations with
God as long as we remain at this level. This sense of anxiety is
further intensified when combined with the symbol of a day of
judgement, but this new symbol also points in another direction,
namely, that God is the lord of history, opening the door to the pos-
sibility of a promised salvation beyond any threatened catastrophe.
The symbolics of sin thus takes on more complex forms than what
appeared at the level of defilement: the sacred as both distant and
nearby; the loss of a personal or communal relationship; the possi-
bility of redemption transcending that of restoration of a prior.
state. But also, subjectively, the sense of a power that lays hold of
one, plus the symbolism of rebellion and going astray, even of aban-
donment countered by the idea of pardon and return. Sin, therefore,
is not simply negative but also in an important sense positive because
it is experienced as something real. This is why it is something for
which people can repent. And as such, it leads not only to a height-
ened sense of self-awareness but also to a demand to know oneself
better.
This brings us to the level of the guilty conscience, which will take
still different forms. It can lead, for example, to an ethical or juridi-
cal reflection on the relation between penalty and responsibility, or
to a more religious emphasis on the need for a scrupulous con-
sciousness, or to a psychological or even theological reflection on the
lived experience of an accused and condemned conscience. What is
most important is that this new level points to the paradox within
the symbolics of the fault of someone who is both responsible for
evil and captive to it, leading to the concept of the bondage of the
will or a servile will. Beyond this, guilt is experienced retrospectively
as already contemporaneous with defilement: it must be our fault
37
that this happened. Thus the emphasis on a wrong use of our
freedom, subjectively experienced, takes over from the more objec-
tive emphasis of defilement or the breaking of a rule, and this is
experienced as a sense of self-diminishment. This new burden may
once again lead to a demand for perfection, but it can also be seen
as revelatory of the very depths of our possible existence in that the
'thou' who is condemned becomes the 'J' who condemns him- or
herself. Conscience then becomes the judge of guilt, but it is now a
guilt that has degrees and therefore extremes, where its poles are the
'wicked' and the 'just' 'The significance of guilt, then, is the possi-
bility of the primacy of "man the measure" over the "sight of God'"
the division between individual fault and the sin of the people; the
opposition between a graduated imputation and an all-inclusive
accusation' (SE, 108).
The metaphor of the tribunal now enters into play. This is rein-
forced by the Greek experience of the city as a people governed by
ethical rules, but also as subject to tragedy. What the Pharisees con-
tribute is an intensification of the idea of a delicate and scrupulous
conscience as well as serious reflection on the law as applied to
difficult cases that resist any final rationalization. Complicating all
this is the fact that this law is understood as a freely accepted
heteronomy because it comes as revelation. This tension between
observing the law and its infinite demand is finally what leads to
what St Paul calls its curse, an experience of our powerlessness to
satisfy all its demands accompanied by the experience of a thor-
oughly guilty conscience. This limit experience, Ricoeur holds,
'makes intelligible all that precedes it insofar as it itself goes beyond
the whole history of guilt; on the other hand, it cannot itself be
understood except insofar as one gets beyond it' (SE, 143). This will
call for a new symbolism, that of justification, something that comes
once again from the outside, indicating how all three levels of the
symbolism of the Fault are interconnected.
To this point, Ricoeur's emphasis has been on how the symbols of
the fault are tied to experience. His next step is to consider how this
experience is mediated through language, specifically through the
language of myths concerning the origin and end of evil. He admits
that modern people no longer think in ways in which myths and
history are intertwined, but he holds that we can still seek to under-
stand myths as just that, as myth: 'To understand the myth as a myth
is to understand what the myth, with its time, its space, its events, its
38
FREEDOM AND NATURE
characters, its drama, adds to the revelatory function of the primary
symbols worked out above' (SE, 162). In fact, he suggests myths do
three things. They embrace humanity in one ideal history; they
narrate a movement from beginning to end that adds an orientation,
character and tension to our experience; and they try to get at the
enigma of human existence, 'namely, the discordance between the
fundamental reality - state of innocence, status of a creature, essen-
tial being - and the actual modality of man, as defiled, sinful, guilty'
(SE, 165). In a word, myth has an ontological bearing in that it
points to a connection between our essential reality and our actual
historical existence in terms of something like a concrete tempo-
ral universal truth whose narrative form cannot be reduced to a
concept. In this sense, myths are revelatory without being explana-
tory in an etiological or scientific sense. They are disclosive in that
they signify the human condition we all participate in and as such
can have a transformative effect on those who attend to them, even
if no myth is ever fully adequate to what it signifies.
16
This is i>\.vhy
there are so many myths and the question will arise whether we can
evaluate and rank them as to their adequacy in saying something
about the fault.
Ricoeur's discussion again proceeds in terms of a typology of
myths that speak of the beginning and end of evil. The first of these
types speaks of the drama of creation and speaks of evil as coex-
tensive with the origin of things. It tells of a god who struggles with
the chaos that precedes creation, which is already a kind of salva-
tion. The second type speaks of the fault in terms of a fall that takes
place in an already existing creation. Here salvation has to be a new
turn in the narrative that constitutes the myth. Between these two
stands a variety of myth that finds its full expression in Greek
tragedy. Here 'the fault appears to be indistinguishable from the very
existence of the tragic hero' (SE, 173), who is guilty even if he does
not commit the fault. Salvation in this type makes freedom coincide
with understood necessity. Finally, there is a myth of the exiled soul.
This one makes a soul-body distinction and focuses on how the pre-
existing soul which has somehow fallen into the body can return to
its original home.
In discussing these types of myths Ricoeur wants to do more than
classify them; he also seeks to discover their internal dynamics and
how, in the end, they all relate to one another because they all speak
of the same thing, the fault. His preference in the end is for one
39
version of the second type, which he sees as the anthropological
myth par excellence, to organize this cycle of myths. This is the
Adamic myth from the Bible, which is, according to Ricoeur's
reading, more a myth of deviation or going astray than strictly one
of a fall. Its central meaning is that according to this myth every
individual finds evil already there, but yet must understand himself
or herself to be somehow responsible for it. No one begins evil
absolutely. It is this myth, understood retrospectively, that best
allows philosophers to make sense of what all the myths together
have to teach us if they are willing to wager belief in it and put it to
the test of self-understanding; that is, if they are willing to consider
whether it not only increases or enhances self-understanding but
also whether it can reaffirm the essential truths of the other myths
as well. This is not to turn philosophy into theology, however. It all
turns rather on the question whether there is something revelatory
about myth as confirmed by what it claims to reveal. Determining
this will depend on a kind of thinking common to both the philoso-
pher and the theologian in the sense that they both presuppose and
draw upon what myth reveals, but this kind of thinking has yet to be
determined.
This thinking will be neither exhaustive nor able to unify every-
thing completely: 'the universe of myths remains'a broken universe'
(SE, 345). What remains is the possibility of a personal appropria-
tion that can take two different forms: confession and reflection,
where these never completely coincide and always run the risk of
falling into allegory. Ricoeur's proposal for avoiding this impasse is
to propose that what is called for is a creative interpretation based on
the symbols and the myths. This leads him to claim that both phi-
losophy and theology have to learn starting from what he expresses
through his well-known motto that 'the symbol gives rise to
thought' There is a double claim here: first, the symbol gives us
something, it has a gift-like character. Second, this gift calls for
thought, which means we have to find a way to begin starting not
from zero but from the symbols and the myths. He finds justification
for this claim in his own conviction that there is no philosophy
without presuppositions. But he is not calling simply for a philoso-
phy based on symbols. Something has begun to change in his
thought in that by the end of this book he comes to see that philos-
ophy must today start again from the fullness of language. I flag this
point because it suggests one reason why Ricoeur never completed
40
FREEDOM AND NATURE
the final volume of his Freedom and Nature project, the one that was
going to deal with Transcendence as the answer to the Fault. He had
come to see that more work had to be done before he could under-
take such a work, much more work, as we shall see.
Here, though, he confines himself to noting that in the modern
world we face the threat of emptying language of all meaning either
by radically formalizing it into a purely abstract combinatory system
or by submitting it to such radical criticism that nothing can any
more be said to mean anything at all. Beyond this desert of criticism,
he maintains, 'we wish to be called again' (SE, 349) and this, he
argues, calls for an approach 'that respects the original enigma of the
symbols, that lets itself be taught by them, but that, beginning from
them, promotes the meaning, forms the meaning in the full respon-
sibility of autonomous thought' (SE, 349-50). This will be possible
because these symbols are already part of language and hence not
radically alien to philosophical thought. What is more, all symbolic
language already includes an element of interpretation, hence s&me-
thing like an incipient hermeneutical theory, one that is capable of
exercising a critical function yet that still recognizes the myth as
myth and the symbol as symbol. Our immediacy of belief has been
lost, but we can hope to hear what they have to say again through
interpretation and thereby aim at a second naivete in and through
the very process of reflection and criticism.
l7
To do this, however,
will call for the development of a philosophical hermeneutics - and
we can already see where Ricoeur's subsequent works will come
from. For the moment, though, this appears as a wager on his part,
a wager that in this way we can obtain a better understanding of
human existence and of the bond between human being and the
being of all beings if we follow the indications of symbolic thought.
This will not be exactly equivalent to a Kantian transcendental
deduction of the symbol as making possible a domain of objectiv-
ity nor will it be a confirmation of the Cartesian cogito. In fact, it
will lead Ricoeur to call for a second Copernican revolution back to
the object and beyond it, following Kant's own turn to the subject,
in that it will show that the cogito is within being, and not vice versa.
The task will be to elaborate existential concepts, 'that is to say, not
only structures of reflection but structures of existence' (SE, 356-57)
that payoff in increased understanding.
41
CHAPTER 3
RICOEUR'S TURN TO HERMENEUTICS
Ricoeur nowhere explains why he set aside his initial three-volume
project of a philosophy of the will, other than to say that he had been
imprudent when he had initially laid out its contours.
1
He did begin
the encounter with psychoanalysis his preface to Fallible Man said
could not be bypassed on the way to a philosophy based on the cre-
ative interpretation of symbols and myths. We can see this from the
big book he produced on Freud and philosophy (FP) and the essays
associated with it, which find their origin in lectures he first gave in
1961. But apart from this work it is obvious that his plan to pursue
'thought that starts from the symbol' (FM, xliv)'now enters into his
famous (or some might say, infamous) detours. Ricoeur himself will
say that these detours are just a way of picking up on questions he
perceived at the end of a previous work or in the process of pursu-
ing it. Sometimes, too, as in Oneself as Another, a detour will turn
out to be a way to get at a problem in a helpful way where the dis-
cussion as he found it in the work of other philosophers was blocked
or had fallen into a dilemma or unresolvable dichotomy.
We can also speculate that a number of other unanticipated
factors contributed to this shift in his thinking. First, and most obvi-
ously, Ricoeur found the problem he was trying to deal with was
more complex than he had anticipated, and hence required new
considerations. Secondly, and perhaps as important, new challenges
appeared on the scene, specifically in the form of structuralism,
which came to dominate French thought in the sixties and early sev-
enties. Thirdly, there was the fact that by the end of the 1960s
Ricoeur had begun to teach regularly outside France, largely in reac-
tion to ongoing turmoil at the University of Paris at Nanterre, fol-
lowing the student riots in 1968. These had actually begun at the new
42
suburban campus in Nanterre, not at the Sorbonne on the left bank
of Paris. The following year Ricoeur was elected dean at Nanterre
because he was widely known to have argued for reforms within the
French university system and because he had voluntarily left the
Sorbonne for this new suburban campus and the opportunities it
seemed to offer for such reforms. But he soon found himself caught
between pressure coming from both the left and the right, including
a physical assault against his person, such that he felt that he had to
resign his position. One significant consequence of this for under-
standing his philosophy is that through his teaching outside France,
particularly in North America, he came to know and study analytic
philosophy, which he sought to take seriously without abandoning
his earlier commitments to phenomenology and the tradition of
reflexive philosophy. He was able to learn much that was helpful
from the analytic way of taking up philosophical questions. He also
recognized limits to its overall approach, ones that prevented it fr!Jm
being able to take up questions he considered important b e c u ~ it
was incapable of dealing with them given the constraints imposed by
its narrow focus on propositions and the logical form of arguments,
a criticism that has been more ignored than taken seriously by ana-
lytic philosophers, much I would say to their detriment.
Ricoeur's work in the immediate period following the publication
of The Symbolism of Evil, apart from the Freud book, is found in his
many essays from this period.
2
We can systematize it by considering
this work under four headings: Freud and psychoanalysis, struc-
turalism, hermeneutics or the question of a theory of interpretation,
and Ricoeur's own linguistic turn. All these, as Ricoeur himself rec-
ognizes, at times overlap, intersect, and even interweave, so what
follows is merely one way of trying to present them in a systematic
fashion. However, it does give us a way to see how this work led to
his later books and essays, which are based on and develop these
topics. It is also a way to give some initial indication of the ground-
work he laid in terms of each of them as calling for further devel-
opment by his successors.
Hermeneutics with its close relation to language forms the central
core of these developments, although in retrospect we can see all
these topics already foreshadowed in his earlier work. The symbols
and myths dealt with in The Symbolism of Evil, for example, were
already at the level of language and already required an interpre-
tive approach. And even his phenomenology of the polarity of the
43
voluntary and the involuntary had assumed a workable language for
describing these phenomena. What the challenge posed by struc-
turalism adds is the necessity to spell out this understanding of
language in greater detail, a need reinforced by the fact that
structuralism itself depends on a certain theory of language.
Structuralism also raises the question of subjectivity in relation to
objectivity in an important way, if only because in its more extreme
formulations it calls into question the very existence of subjectivity,
or at least reduces it to an ultimately illusory product of some prior
independent reality. Freud enters into consideration in a slightly
different way. There were French thinkers who did give structuralist
interpretations of Freud, Jacques Lacan being the best-known name
among them. Ricoeur, however, chooses to focus solely on Freud's
own work as another challenge to his own phenomenological and
reflective approach, particularly insofar as it offers a more developed
theory of the unconscious and its importance than Ricoeur was able
to acknowledge in referring to the unconscious as one form of the
involuntary in Freedom and Nature. Hence we shall begin with this
work, even while recognizing that it already overlaps the other
themes enumerated above, as can be seen from the order of the orig-
inal French title of this book which is 'On Interpretation: An Essay
on Freud'
RICOEUR'S ENCOUNTER WITH FREUD
Ricoeur's concern is with Freud, he announces, not psychoanalysis
or even later interpretations of Freud. Moreover, as a philosopher
he can only appeal to Freud's texts, which are there for anyone to
read, not to the practice of the analytic approach as experienced
either by an analyst or a patient. What is most important is that
Freud himself poses a philosophical problem in that 'psychoanaly-
sis conflicts with every other global interpretation of the nature of
man because it is itself an interpretation of culture' (FP, xii), so
already Ricoeur's focus has moved beyond his initial question of the
status of the involuntary. The method Ricoeur proposes using to
consider Freud as a philosophical problem is threefold. It will focus
on 'the texture or structure of Freudian discourse' (ibid.), approach-
ing it first as posing an epistemological problem (the nature of
interpretation in psychoanalysis), then as a problem for reflective
philosophy (concerning the new self-understanding that follows
44
from this interpretation), and finally as a dialectical problem
(namely, does Freudian interpretation exclude all others?). In this
way, this book picks up on the problem left unresolved at the end of
The Symbolism of Evil: the relationship between a hermeneutics of
symbols and a philosophy of concrete reflection. This new approach
is said to be justified because Ricoeur now realizes that 'there is an
area today where all philosophical investigations cut across one
another - the area of language' (FP, 3).
What Freud brings to this question is a 'semantics of desire' in that
dreams and other symptoms for the analyst are held to aim at some-
thing meaningful, something that can only be reached through a kind
of interpretation, psychoanalytic interpretation. This interpretive
approach is necessary because desires tend to express themselves in
distorted forms of language. Because of this, the language used to
express desire means more than it first appears to say; hence it can be
said to be marked by a double meaning similar to that of the symbols
of evil. Can this hidden meaning in the case of psychoanalysis be
uncovered or does it always conceal itself? The first lesson Ricoeur
draws here is that his idea of a symbol needs to be reconsidered.
'Symbol' can be conceived either too broadly, so that everything is a
symbol, or too narrowly, so that the symbol only stands for itself as
in formal combinatory systems like the most abstract furms of sym-
bolic logic, or such that the relation between the two levels of
meaning is held to be merely analogical. What Ricoeur now says is
that analogy, in fact, is only one of the possible relations between the
manifest and latent meaning in any symbol. Therefore what really
needs to be explored is the fact that there is a signifying function to
any symbol, whatever form it may take. The Symbolism of Evil had
already recognized the existence of this signifying function and the
fact that it functions in terms of language about the sacred, dreams,
or the poetic imagination. This allows Ricoeur to see that what Freud
does in regard to this question of a symbolic function is first to limit
the symbolic field to just one of these options, the oneiric one.
Ricoeur also sees that his own question is whether the symbolic func-
tion in general can ever express an 'innocent' relation or if it must
always be a kind of cunning distortion.
A further important development for Ricoeur's philosophy is
that he now sees that the kind of interpretation proposed in The
Symbolism of Evil not only stood too uncritically in the tradition of
biblical exegesis, it was too ad hoc in its method. What is required if
45
we are to talk about interpretation critically is a theory of interpre-
tation. But what Freud shows is that this theory is internally at vari-
ance with itself, depending on whether the interpreter approaches
the object of interpretation from a perspective of trust that some-
thing meaningful is already expressed there or from one of suspicion
that the meaning, if there is one, lies elsewhere and is only available
through a kind of unmasking approach. 'According to the one pole,
hermeneutics is understood as the manifestation and restoration of
a meaning addressed to me in the manner of a message, a procla-
mation, or as is sometimes said, a kerygma; according to the other
pole, it is understood as a demystification, as a reduction of illusion'
(FP, 27). What Ricoeur begins to do therefore is to formulate a
theory of interpretation that will be able to incorporate both these
approaches even while admitting the tension between them. This is
why he proposes that his own theory will have to take up a double
motivation, one that can be characterized as a willingness to suspect,
but also as a willingness to listen. He says this because, as he had
already indicated in The Symbolism of Evil, he is convinced that sym-
bolic language is ultimately rooted in life and is not simply empty or
meaningless language. Freud, Ricoeur sees, stands closer to the pole
of suspicion. Indeed, Freud can be classed with the other two great
'masters of suspicion': Marx and Nietzsche. All three, Ricoeur sug-
gests, can be read as saying things do not mean what they appear to
mean and that this is a lesson we have to learn if we are to get beyond
every form of false consciousness.
What is more, their emphasis on recognizing necessity, once false
consciousness is removed, assuming it can be removed, poses a crisis
for reflective philosophy. They all challenge Descartes' cogito argu-
ment in that they call into question the status of the subject pole
within it, by finally reducing subjectivity itself to being nothing more
than a myth or the product of some more basic reality. Ricoeur, on
the contrary, thinks that Descartes was correct in positing the ques-
tion of the self as the starting point of modern philosophy - but
notice how his language has already begun to shift from 'subject'
to 'self'; we are on the way to Oneself as Another. Ricoeur adds,
however, that this self is not the object of an intuition. It is reach-
able only through reflection, but reflection that is now itself a process
of interpretation, a process of interpretation that begins from the
object, not from the subject. This is why he says, 'The first truth - I
am, I think - remains as abstract and empty as it is invincible; it has
46
to be "mediated" by the ideas, actions, works, institutions, and mon-
uments that objectify it' (FP, 43). Because of this, reflection cannot
be simply a question for an epistemological theory meant to justify
science or even, with Kant, duty. It has to be understood as a reap-
propriation of our very effort to exist, hence as a way beyond
'forgetfulness' and we are pointed toward Ricoeur's late work,
Memory, History, Forgetting. Such reflection does have an ethical
aspect in that it leads from alienation to freedom, but the ethics
here involves more than morality considered as a set of normative
rules - as Ricoeur will argue in greater detail in Oneself as Another
and in The Just and Reflections on the Just.
One more problem has to be acknowledged in light of this com-
mitment to reflection. It is the question whether such a philosophy,
with its commitment to the goal of universality, like all philosophy,
can proceed on the basis of contingent cultural productions and the
kind of equivocal meanings found in symbols, especially when such
an undertaking brings into play the conflict between the plurality of
rival interpretations found in the modern world. The price to pay for
such a hermeneutic philosophy, Ricoeur sees, will be that we have to
give up any immediate claim to universality in favour of the fusion
of contingency and universality to be found in the movement of
interpretation. He also recognizes that the question whether the con-
flict of interpretations can finally be settled remains an open one. A
critical question in evaluating his contributions to a hermeneutic
philosophy, therefore, will be whether we must conclude that the
conflict of intepretations must always remain unsettled. Or does he
give us the tools to deal with this question? One suggestion is already
present: reflection, Ricoeur holds, finally does not argue, particu-
larly when it comes to choosing its starting point. Rather, like
Kantian transcendental philosophy, it seeks to state the conditions
of possibility whereby empirical consciousness can seek to approxi-
mate, if not be made equal to, univocal conceptual thought. But for
Ricoeur this effort is always based on something closer to testimony
and conviction than to some presupposed standard of logical valid-
ity. Testimony to one's basic convictions bears witness to a source of
meaning beyond oneself, where this self is not the immediate subject
of reflection discovered in the cogito. This fundamental conviction
is what holds together the hermeneutics of suspicion and that of a
willingness to listen, to trust meaning as given. Both ask: 'Can the
dispossession of consciousness to the profit of another home of
47
meaning be understood as an act of reflection, as the first gesture of
reappropriation?' (SE, 55). The possibility of such concrete reflec-
tion therefore is the question Ricoeur brings to his interpretation of
Freud.
A PHILOSOPHICAL INTERPRETATION OF FREUD
Ricoeur begins with a series of readings of Freud's works. Each new
reading is meant to complete and correct the previous one by broad-
ening the horizon that situates his interpretation, by including
more of Freud's work subsequent to what was considered in the pre-
vious interpretation. What justifies this expansion is that while the
Freudian system applies to the individual subject, it does so in terms
of situations and relations that are intersubjective. This can be seen
in the development of Freud's own thought from what Ricoeur calls
an 'energetics' to a hermeneutics, from an explanation in terms of
psychic forces to an interpretive understanding of an apparent
meaning, where the proposed interpretation has to be able to inte-
grate the economy of these psychic forces. The first energetic stage
reveals the unsurpassable character of desire for Freud. But Freud,
it turns out, did not stop with this discovery. He went on to apply it
to culture and finally to a theory of instincts governed by death,
something that Ricoeur sees as in its own way a return to myth and
hence to hermeneutics.
Ricoeur's problem at this first level, therefore, is to consider how
Freud deals with the question of knowledge at the intersection of his
energetics and his hermeneutics. 'As I see it', he says, 'the whole
problem of Freudian epistemology may be centralized in a single
question: how can the economic explanation be involved in an inter-
pretation dealing with meaning; and conversely, how can interpre-
tation be an aspect of the economic explanation?' (FP, 66). To put it
another way, is language capable of completely integrating force, the
force of desire, within itself?
To deal with this question Ricoeur works his way through Freud's
writings, from the early 'Project' from 1895, through the Interpretation
oj Dreams, where the subordination of explanation to interpretation
first becomes evident, to the 'Papers on Metapsychology', where the
question of the representation of instincts comes to the fore, without
ever really resolving the force-meaning relation. What these later
works do instead is to shift the point of coincidence back into the
48
unconscious itself without finally being able to set aside the affects or
feelings that accompany the ideas or representations that seek to
express these hidden forces. That 'psychoanalysis never confronts one
with bare forces, but always with forces in search of meaning' (FP,
151), Ricoeur concludes, means that instinct turns out to be some-
thing like a limit concept meant to make possible the intelligibility of
Freud's theory of the intersection of the economic and the hermeneu-
tic in the psyche, a conjunction that the Freudian metapsychology
cannot give up without ceasing to be psychoanalysis.
Ricoeur turns next to Freud's discussions of culture, art, morality
and religion, which he sees as being based on an analogical exten-
sion of the interpretation of dreams and neuroses. Hence the valid-
ity of these interpretations depends not so much on the cultural
objects considered as on the point of view adopted and the opera-
tive concepts used. Yet the application of the metapsychological
model to these new objects does transform Freud's basic model in
that it makes possible the transition to the topography of the ego tid
and superego, which introduces a new economy. Rather than con-
sidering everything in relation to the libido alone, 'here the libido is
subject to something other than itself, to a demand for renunciation
that creates a new economic situation' (FP, 156), one that no longer
is solipsistic but rather interpersonal. And this, in turn, calls for a
radical recasting of the theory of instincts. One clear example of this
is the fact that even Freud himself acknowledges that works of art
do not simply look back to infancy. There is a prospective aspect to
them, to the point that they can also be considered as the symbols
of a personal synthesis by the artist rather than as a regressive
symbol of unresolved conflicts. If such is the case, Ricoeur asks,
'could it be the true meaning of sublimation is to promote new
meanings by mobilizing old energies initially invested in archaic
figures?' (FP, 175). If so, the limits of psychoanalysis are not fixed.
And if these limits can be transgressed indefinitely, then it will only
be what Freud himself thinks justifies psychoanalysis that limits it,
namely, his 'decision to recognize in the phenomena of culture only
what falls under an economics of desire and resistances' (FP, 176).
But, at the same time, the door is open to other readings of culture
than this purely reductive one, readings whose task will be 'not so
much to unmask the repressed and the agency of repression to show
what lies behind the masks, as to set free the interplay of references
between signs' (FP, 177).
49
In fact, Ricoeur argues this possibility can already be seen in
Freud's own discussion of sublimation in relation to the id, ego,
superego topography in that sublimation points to the way in which
people relate their desires to an ideal, a form of the sublime. This in
turn has a rebound effect on the earlier work in that it brings into
play genetic explanations whose 'purpose is to coordinate an onto-
genesis and a phylogenesis within one fundamental history, which
could be called the history of desire and authority' (FP, 179). These
new genetic explanations complicate the tension between the
pleasure-un pleasure principle and the reality principle, with con-
sequences that are not at first easy to specify. Certainly one
consequence is that emphasis shifts from what is repressed to the
agent of repression, which is more a role than a place in the
id-ego-superego topography. What is new is that external dangers
now playa role along with internal ones. Yet the genetic explanation
is not exhaustive, so Freud must fall back on an economic one in
terms of the superego, which again calls for further explanation of
not only how it works, but why and why as well its solutions
should, as in the case of religionfor Freud, turn out to be illusions.
One answer Freud gives is that these illusions are meant to protect
the individual against the superior power of nature. Another is that
they are a way of dealing with not only the inevitability of death, but
also with the death instinct that Freud now sees active in the psyche
and which he presents as a struggle between eros and thanatos.
Ricoeur interprets Freud's discussion of this struggle 'between
giants' as a shift from a more scientific to a more romantic view-
point, one that affects in turn Freud's understanding of the idea of
reality to the point of itself becoming a possible cipher of wisdom
(FP, 262) through a recognition of necessity that lies beyond illusion
and consolation.
3
Ricoeur's own judgement is critical here. He says, 'nothing indicates
that Freud finally harmonized the theme of the reality principle with
the theme of Eros the first being an essentially critical theme
directed against archaic objects and illusions, the second an essen-
tially lyrical theme of the love of life and thus a theme directed against
the death instinct' (FP, 337). Therefore Ricoeur proposes his own
answer, his philosophical interpretation of Freud. Two major goals
are at stake in it: (1) to arbitrate the conflict between two opposed
hermeneutics, that of distrust or suspicion and that of trust or confi-
dence; and (2) to find a way to integrate 'philosophical reflection' into
50
the process of interpretation. Ricoeur now realizes that it is not
enough to say that symbols already carry these possibilities within
themselves. It will be necessary to 'attain the level of thought at which
this synthesis can be understood' (FP, 341). To get there, Ricoeur pro-
poses three steps. The first one returns to the epistemological question
of the place of explanation in psychoanalysis and its limits. This step
will show the place of psychoanalysis between scientific psychology,
on the one hand, and phenomenology, on the other. Next, Ricoeur
will propose that Freudian theory can be understood as an 'archeol-
ogy of the subject', one that concrete reflection will have to learn to
incorporate into itself. Finally, thinking of Hegelian phenomenology,
Ricoeur will ask whether this archeology does not remain abstract
and not concrete so long as it is not completed by a 'teleology, with a
progressive synthesizing of figures and categories, where the meaning
of each is clarified by the meaning of further figures or categories'
(FP, 342). If this is so, then regression and progression can be under-
stood as two possible directions of interpretation, opposed to ~ h
other yet also complementary - answering the first question men-
tioned above. These two directions it will further turn out can be
united, Ricoeur argues, through a dialectic that locates their unity in
the very origin of our ability to speak, to use language in meaningful.
ways. It will only remain then to consider what consequences this
might have for a general theory of interpretation.
In seeking the place of psychoanalysis, Ricoeur holds that the
answer to this question depends on the hybrid character of psycho-
analysis owing to the fact that 'it arrives at its energy concepts
solely by the way of interpretation' (FP, 347). This means that psy-
choanalysis is not an observational science dealing with facts of
behaviour. It is 'an exegetical science dealing with relationships of
meaning between substitute objects and the primordial (and lost)
instinctual objects' (FP, 359). Yet what it says falls neither within the
discourse of the natural sciences nor within that of phenomenology.
Psychoanalysis speaks of motives rather than causes, but its expla-
nations resemble those of causal explanations without being identi-
cal with them. This is why Ricoeur characterizes Freud's work as a
semantics of desire: 'it is a mixed discourse that falls outside the
motive-cause alternative' (FP, 363). But because analysis takes place
through language, the problem is how to get to a discourse that can
speak the truth of what these desires demand. This will be a dis-
course that resembles something like a rational mythology since the
51
symbols psychoanalysis deals with arise at the crossroads where
these demands get articulated. In interpreting them, psychoanalysis
tries to formulate something like the conditions of possibility for this
semantics of desire.
This new kind of discourse cannot simply be absorbed into phe-
nomenology without loss, although there is an affinity between them
in that both of them aim at a true discourse. But psychoanalysis is
not reflective, whereas phenomenology is. In turn, there is no paral-
lel to the technique of psychoanalytic archeology in phenomenology,
which can only deal with the unconscious as what psychoanalysis
calls the pre-conscious. Nor can phenomenology really incorporate
Freud's energy discourse, which as we have seen lies at the intersec-
tion of desire and language.
4
This is why Freud's notion of transfer-
ence in the relation between the patient and the psychoanalyst poses
so many pro blems for phenomenology, which knows no such relation
in its own discussions of intersubjectivity. In the end, Ricoeur there-
fore concludes, psychoanalysis has to be understood as 'unique and
irreducible form of praxis', one that puts its finger on something phe-
nomenology never perfectly attains: our relation to our origins and
to what psychoanalysis knows as the id and the superego (FP, 418).
But as already indicated, Ricoeur does think that philosophical
reflection can take up these conclusions by integrating them into a
dialectic of an archeology and teleology of the subject. This leads to
the question 'what subject?' This question is not meant to carry us back
to the Cartesian subject, for what Freud teaches us is that the subject
is never the subject one first thinks it is. In this sense, we may even think
of Freud as presenting something like an anti-phenomenology in that
we have to displace or decentre this first subject through a process of
interpretation. This means reversing the point of view of the cogito
and overcoming what turns out to be its pseudo evidence and even its
narcissism. 'To raise this discovery to the reflective level is to make
the dispossession of the subject of consciousness coequal with the
dispossession already achieved, of the intended object' (FP, 425).
Furthermore, 'everything we can say with - and eventually against-
Freud must henceforth bear the mark of this "wounding" of our se1f-
love' (FP, 428). In other words, the question of consciousness turns out
to be as obscure as that of the unconscious. But, Ricoeur is willing to
wager, this relinquishing of the cogito can in fact turn out to be the
beginning of a reappropriation of meaning if we can accept that what
Freud calls the psychical representations of instincts aim in fact at a
52
meaning beyond themselves, one constituted through a work of inter-
pretation. Consciousness, it turns out, must become hermeneutic
consciousness.
It does so when the archeological moment of reflection turns into
a teleological one. At the same time, the opposition between these
two kinds of hermeneutics can be resolved if we can show that this
archeology and teleology stand in a necessary dialectical relation-
ship. Ricoeur seeks to show that this is the case by invoking Hegel's
phenomenology of spirit. It is not a question of simply juxtaposing
Freud and Hegel or of some easy eclecticism, but of an 'exegesis of
consciousness' that 'would consist in a progression through all the
spheres of meaning that a given consciousness must encounter and
appropriate in order to reflect itself as a self, a human, adult, con-
scious self' (FP, 463). This is a self that does not figure in the
Freudian or any other topography of the psyche, nor does it appear
among the vicissitudes of instincts that constitute the theme of
Freud's economics. It is the outcome of a genesis from lower ~
higher that goes beyond this economic level. Still, to link Freud to
Hegel Ricoeur must also argue that there is an element of Freud in
Hegel and vice versa. He does so by arguing that they share a
common problematic. 'The teleology of self-consciousness does not
reveal simply that life is surpassed by self-consciousness; it also
reveals that life and desire, as initial positing, primal affirmation,
immediate expansion, are forever unsurpassable. At the very heart
of self-consciousness, life is that obscure density that self-
consciousness, in its advance, reveals behind itself as the source of
the very first differentiation of the self' (FP, 469). This genesis
reveals itself in the dialectic of recognition, first of oneself, then of
other selves. In this dialectic, desire is mediated, but not eradicated.
Next, Ricoeur argues that such a teleology is already present in
Freud, that his psychoanalysis cannot be understood apart from this
corresponding synthesis. This can be seen in the operative concepts
Freud makes use of (such as identification) as well as in those he the-
matizes (such as object loss), as well as in certain unresolved prob-
lems such as the idea of sublimation. In a word, Freud's own theory
is already dialectical in that analysis does not always lead to a regres-
sion to a more primitive stage but is ultimately meant to lead to
something like an education of desire, as when Freud famously says,
'Where id was, there shall ego be.' Ricoeur locates this intersection
between Freud's archeology and teleology in the mixed texture of
53
the discourse used by psychoanalysis. This gets expressed concretely
through a use of symbols characterized by an over-determination of
meaning, what Ricoeur will subsequently call a surplus of meaning.
What is at issue therefore once more is how to think in terms of these
symbols.
A first step toward doing so is to recognize that the ambiguity of
these symbols is not necessarily something to be judged negatively:
'the ambiguity of symbolism is not a lack of univocity but is rather
the possibility of carrying and engendering opposed interpretations,
each of which is self-consistent' (FP, 496). Symbols therefore can
meaningfully be said both to conceal and to reveal something. They
represent in a concrete unity what reflection splits into opposed
interpretations: the opposed hermeneutics disjoin and decompose
what concrete reflection seeks to recompose and return to a speech
that is simply heard and understood, in what Ricoeur had already
called a kind of second naivete. He does not go on here to develop
the theory of interpretation that is obviously called for, choosing
instead to use the model of interpretation he had laid out in The
Symbolism of Evil to see whether we can discern a hierarchy in
Freud's symbols, one that points to something like a non-libidinal
emancipation and realm of human meaning, particularly through
works of art - for example, in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex in relation to
Freud's Oedipus complex. 'Between dreams and artistic creativity
there is a functional continuity, in the sense that disguise and dis-
closure are operative in both of them, but in an inverse proportion'
(FP, 520). The question is whether Freud's economics can really
account for this. More specifically, can it account for the qualita-
tive difference that renders instincts dialectical and disclosive of
something beyond themselves?
Ricoeur thinks not, even while he acknowledges Freud's accom-
plishments. He uses the question of the status of religion and reli-
gious faith to indicate where he differs. Rather than seeing faith and
religion as merely an illusion, Ricoeur says that while reflection
cannot give us the origin of religious symbols, it can consider them
as something like a call addressed to us. The question then is what
the existence of such a call might mean for a theory of interpreta-
tion. His answer requires introducing the idea of a hermeneutic
circle: 'to believe is to listen to the call, but to hear the call we must
interpret the message. Thus we must believe in order to understand
and understand in order to believe' (FP, 525). But the existence of
54
evil prevents the reflection that works within this circle from ever
turning into absolute knowledge. Recalling what he had said about
the relationship between symbols and thought in The Symbolism of
Evil, Ricoeur now says, 'All symbols give rise to thought, but the
symbols of evil show in an exemplary way that there is always more
in myths and symbols than in all of our philosophy, and that a philo-
sophical interpretation of symbols will never become absolute
knowledge' (FP, 527). This is why the Hegelian framework he is
drawing on must be tempered by a return to Kant, 'that is to say,
from a dissolution of the problem of evil in dialectic to the recogni-
tion of the emergence of evil as something inscrutable' (ibid.). But
the symbolism of evil overcome is also one of reconciliation in a
sense that transcends the consolation offered by psychoanalysis.
It speaks of an 'in spite of' that makes room for hope for some-
thing more than just consolation, 'thanks to' the transcendent other
grasped in faith.
It is important to see that Ricoeur offers something more thal1 a
mere apology for religious faith here. If faith is thinkable, it must be
a faith that can undergo the process of demystification of false con-
sciousness called for by Freud's reductive hermeneutics.
5
Idols must
die so that symbols can live.
THROUGH STRUCTURALISM TO HERMENEUTICS
Freud was not the only challenge confronting Ricoeur's effort to
develop a philosophy that could learn to think starting from the
symbolic language people use to talk about evil. Another new
challenger had come on the scene: structuralism. Structuralism
was a dominant voice in French intellectual circles throughout the
1960s well into the 70s, before giving way to what was at first called
post-structuralism, then deconstruction or post-modernism. It also
caught the attention of many literary critics in North America for a
time. Structuralism in its heyday meant different things to different
people, but our emphasis will be on what Ricoeur made of it.
6
Its
origins lay in the work of a Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure,
who in the early years of the twentieth century had lectured on what
he presented as an introduction to general linguistics, that is, to lin-
guistics as a science. He never published these lectures as a book, but
his students put together a volume based on his and a few of his stu-
dents' lecture notes that was to have a major impact in later years.7
55
Saussure's work was important in that it was taken as demonstrat-
ing how linguistics as a discipline, which to that point had largely
been a historical study of different languages and their development
over time, could become 'scientific' It could do so by focusing on an
atemporal 'object' of inquiry that not only would account for the
existence of language but would also permit objective investigation
of its constitutive structures. This is why the label structuralism
came to be applied by those who sought to build on Saussure's work.
What they did was to try to extend Saussure's structuralism to other
disciplines, especially in the social sciences. In a word, they thought
that if Saussure had shown that linguistics could become a genuine
science by adopting a structural approach, this could also be a way
for the other social sciences to attain such status.
Basically, what Saussure argued was that language should be con-
sidered in terms of its basic structure, which he called langue, ignor-
ing its use in speech, which he labelled parole. Langue was to be
considered synchronically, that is, by bracketing any reference to
time in order to isolate the structure making up langue as a 'sign
system' What was particularly innovative about what Saussure had
to say about such a system was that it is the differences between the
signs within the system that are fundamental, not the signs them-
selves. In other words, the signs have no meaning ~ x e p t in relation
to all the other signs through their differences from them. These
signs themselves are then further analysable into an internal struc-
ture combining a signifier and a signified, a distinction that would
have important consequences for the post-structuralist movements
in that it did not require the idea of an external reference beyond the
sign system.
Saussure's ideas seemed to be confirmed by subsequent work in
linguistics applied to the distinctive sounds that make up any lan-
guage. For any given language, these phonemes were shown to be
limited in number and they could be arranged in terms of opposi-
tions (such as voiced vs. unvoiced), strengthening the idea of a struc-
ture that could be defined in terms of its relations, not its elements.
This work came to the attention of the French anthropologist
Claude Levi-Strauss, who had been trained in philosophy but turned
to anthropology when he moved to Brazil to teach. He spent the
period of the Second World War in New York where he encountered
the Russian-born linguist Roman Jacobson who introduced him to
these new developments. Levi-Strauss was subsequently to apply
56
this new notion of structure to the study of kinship networks in
tribal societies like those he had studied in Brazil, demonstrating in
this way the possibility of applying structural methods within the
broader social sciences.
8
Ricoeur comes into the discussion because
Levi-Strauss went on to argue that such methods can also be applied
to the study of myths, a project he developed at great length.
9
Early
on, therefore, it was Levi-Strauss's work on myth, along with his
claims for structuralism as a scientific method, that Ricoeur had to
confront. Later on, it was attempts by others to extend structural-
ism to narratives in general (recall that Ricoeur had already identi-
fied myths as types of narrative in The Symbolism of Evil) that would
draw his attention.
What Ricoeur first criticizes about such an approach is its setting
aside any consideration of time, thereby ignoring the question of
understanding traditions that may change yet continue to exist over
time as well as the social forms based upon such traditions, ones that
recognize themselves as living in history. Linked to this concern ~
his question of how to deal with changes in meaning, and beyond
this, the possibility of new meaning. Yet, at the same time, Ricoeur
does seek to find a way to acknowledge the value of a structural
approach insofar as it does discover something that can help us to
recognize the forms it considers. What he rejects, however, is the sub-
ordination of diachrony, development over time, to synchrony, an
atemporal slice of the system considered. This he thinks eliminates
any possibility of changes in meaning since the structures discovered
are held to be not only atemporal but also universal. Ricoeur's own
emphasis is rather on what he was coming to call hermeneutic
understanding, which he believed had to put the emphasis in just the
opposite way; that is, for a hermeneutic philosophy diachrony is
more important than synchrony. Without this presupposition there
is no way to acknowledge the historicity of symbols - and of their
meanings.
Next, Ricoeur questions whether structuralism's emphasis on the
alleged objective status of the structures it discovers does not leave
out their relation to subjectivity, at the same time that it claims to
know something. Ricoeur even suggests that structuralism, because
it looks for basic conditions of possibility in constitutive structures,
might be thought of as a 'Kantianism without a transcendental
subject' (CI, 52), when it does not end up becoming simply a purely
abstract formalism. Anticipating his own later work on selfbood,
57
Ricoeur asks: 'who says this is the structure of language (or of any
semiotic system)?' In a way that anticipates his own subsequent work
on the philosophy of language, what Ricoeur reiterates here is his
basic presupposition that philosophy must always begin from some-
thing beyond itself that precedes it. What he now can add is that this
non-philosophical starting point is in some way something that we
already understand, albeit not through an understanding that nec-
essarily has been criticized or even reflected upon, in our use of lan-
guage, a use that is itself already meaningful, otherwise no questions
can be asked. 10 He therefore also sees that it is necessary to question
Saussure's original distinction between langue and parole, where
only the former can be dealt with scientifically, implying that parole
is ultimately beyond rational consideration. He finds a way to do this
through the work of another linguist, the Sanskrit scholar Emile
Benveniste, who had argued that it is also possible to have a linguis-
tics not only of parole but also of what Benveniste called 'discourse',
where discourse is the use of langue to say something. Hence dis-
course is not just speech, but already meaningful speech.
We can summarize the way Ricoeur spells out this possibility as
follows. At one extreme, semiotic structures are purely formal closed
systems. They are not even yet anything we can call a language. To
become a language, first at the level of langue, the elements of such
a system, even when defined differentially, have to be considered as a
lexicon, as meaningful words. Construing signs as words, however,
means bringing an already existing interpretation to the structure
considered. It already presupposes the fullness of language as spoken
and understood. Later Ricoeur will see that this point leads to a
general critical point that can be directed against later forms of struc-
turalism when they came to hold that the structures they discovered
were 'deep' or underlying structures that generated the 'surface' phe-
nomena we ordinarily take for granted. This, for Ricoeur, is another
version of the hermeneutics of suspicion in that it claims that
nothing really is what it first appears to be. It is only the surface mani-
festation of an underlying prior reality. But Ricoeur argues that all
these appeals to deep structures always presuppose what they are
supposed to generate, something that can be demonstrated by
showing that there is something on the surface they really can not
account for but presuppose, namely, change. Deep structures cannot
account for this because static structures only can be transformed
into more static structures, and then only if the function that brings
58
about the transformation is imported from elsewhere. In fact,
Ricoeur argues, we recognize the need for such a transformation
because we already understand the end result. This critical point will
playa large role in Ricoeur's later analysis of structuralism as applied
not just to myths but to all forms of narrative discourse.
But to return to his early discussion of structuralism, and the
introduction of the idea of discourse, we can say that what Ricoeur
sees is that like the words in a dictionary, words at the level of langue
are polysemous. They have more than one meaning, depending on
the relations between them within the structure considered. Because
of this polysemy at the level of langue the words do not yet 'say' any-
thing nor do they refer to anything beyond themselves, given the
closed nature of their constitutive structure. They are simply signs,
and as such, they are necessary but not yet sufficient conditions for
discourse, which is the level where something actually is said. For
something meaningful to be said a syntax or grammar that can yield
a sentence is also required. With this comes the problem of predich-
tion, a point that will have important consequences when Ricoeur
turns his attention to the question of metaphorical discourse. The
minimal unit of discourse, therefore, is the sentence, which serves to
limit the polysemy of its words through its syntax, without necessar-
ily eliminating it completely. Sentences are not usually univocal in
their meanings but rather plurivocal. They can mean more than one
thing. Consider, for example, the command to 'go jump in the lake!'
Does it mean to jump into the lake from the shore or to enter the
water and jump up and down? Most times therefore individual sen-
tences also require some reference to their context in order to be
understood. As he develops his hermeneutic theory, Ricoeur will
continue to elaborate the question of what counts as context and how
it affects the meaning of discourse.
Already here, though, Ricoeur can draw on Benveniste in order
more precisely to define discourse as instances in which somebody
says something to somebody about something. What we can see
from this is that it is at the level of discourse that subjectivity comes
into play, and that it does so potentially in terms of more than one
subject, a speaker and his or her audience (one can also talk to
oneself, of course, which is exactly what Plato called thinking). In
conveying a message, discourse also raises the question of what this
message says and what it is about. This introduces the questions of
sense and reference in a way not applicable at the level of langue,
59
where polysemy reigns and there is nothing beyond the internal rela-
tions of the sign system to consider. Discourse, moreover, can be
reflective because it can be used to talk about the language used to
talk about anything whatsoever, just as it can also be used to talk
about things other than itself. Hence new ways of considering
meaning are required at this level, ones not found in structuralism
when it limits itself to semiotic systems. Discourse, finally, always
occurs as a real event in time, unlike the atemporal abstract struc-
tures discovered by structuralism. These structures do somehow
endure at least in the sense that they can be identified at any time
(and if they do change, they do so only slowly over time) but events
of discourse pass away. They can even be said to vanish.
Ricoeur's key claim here is that although an event of discourse dis-
appears, if only by becoming past, its meaning may endure. This is
what hermeneutic theory has to make sense of, for if meanings do
endure when the event has passed away, these meanings can be 'taken
up' - appropriated will become the applicable technical term - by new
subjects in new times and new contexts. This possibility of meaning
so enduring, Ricoeur proposes, can be confirmed if we shift our
attention from spoken to written (or what Ricoeur calls inscribed)
discourse. For while the event of speaking vanishes, texts remain and
can be read by anyone who knows how to read. Reading, to be sure,
is not always easy, as can be seen in the case of texts from antiquity,
whether from the Bible or from Greece and Rome, where not only is
the language one that is no longer spoken, but the cultural context
that produced the text in question no longer exists in its original
form. In fact, the need to overcome such historical distance was one
of the motivating factors that led to the development of modern
hermeneutic theory that Ricoeur is drawing on as a resource here. He
already sees, for example, that the need to learn a second language
and sometimes as well the need to produce translations as require-
ments for overcoming such historical distance is something that sug-
gests that today this hermeneutic theory can be extended to respond
to cultural as well as temporal distance. This is a point his develop-
ing hermeneutical theory will come more and more to acknowledge.
At the end of his life, he saw that it also required thinking more about
the role translation plays in achieving such understanding of what is
foreign to us."
But to stay here with the idea of a text as an instance of inscribed
discourse, we can say that Ricoeur was able to make a number of
60
important discoveries. As already stated, the original event of dis-
course that produces a text disappears, as eventually does its author
and the original audience, and its cultural setting. Yet Ricoeur's
argument is that the discourse a text transmits remains potentially
meaningful if it can still be read. His claim is first of all that such
reading is possible because what the text says has both sense and ref-
erence. It both says something meaningful and is about something
beyond itself. Furthermore, we discover this sense and reference, on
the one hand, by recognizing the text's genre, something that we
begin by assuming, then confirm, modify or disconfirm through the
process of reading. On the other hand, since any text as an instance
of some genre is also unique as being just this text, we gain further
insight into the text's sense and reference in relation to this unique-
ness, something Ricoeur places under the question of grasping
its style. This is another factor that a theory of reading must also
be able to recognize and incorporate. But, most importantly, as intel-
ligible, a text (and by analogy any instance of discourse) is men-
ingful in that it combines this sense and reference. This broader
meaning is not to be identified with something allegedly in the
author's mind or even with the author's intention in producing the
text. Nor is it what the original audience took the text to mean,
although it is possible to try to rediscover what a text might have
meant to its first audience or to attempt to write a history of recep-
tion of the text's meaning as a second-order undertaking. No, what
makes the text meaningful in the first place, giving it both sense and
reference, is what Ricoeur calls the world of the text. This is some-
thing the text, so to speak, projects not behind but in front of itself.
Discourse we have said is always about something. What texts are
ultimately about is this 'world' where it is a world that readers can
imagine themselves inhabiting. Hence to understand a text (or any
instance of discourse), for Ricoeur, depends on grasping the world
of a text (or of what is said) as one that I or we can imagine myself
or ourselves inhabiting. But since the'!, (or we) in question differ
over time, so too the meaning of the text as appropriated will differ
in some way from time to time and place to place, without for all that
becoming meaningless. Using an image that Ricoeur takes from
Hans-Georg Gadamer, we can say that these horizons of meaning
overlap or even 'fuse' in the act of understanding what is said, hence
they are not beyond comparison with one another. A text becomes
meaningless only when it can no longer be understood. Note this
61
does not mean that one has to accept this meaning or that it is not
open to critique. The only thing claimed is that criticism always
begins from such a first-order hermeneutical understanding, which
itself requires a capacity to understand and to use language. This is
why we can speak of Ricoeur as taking a deliberate linguistic turn
on the basis of his hermeneutical theory, one that brings questions
about language to the fore.
There is one other important point to note about Ricoeur's move
to consideration of language as discourse. Discourse we have said
first occurs at the level of the sentence. It is not, however, confined
to this level. Instances of discourse can be longer than a single sen-
tence. In such cases they are what Ricoeur calls instances of extended
discourse. The questions of meaning and truth take on new dimen-
sions at this level if we take seriously the fullness of language. That
is, we cannot simply say or assume that the meaning and truth of
extended discourse is simply a conjunction of the meaning and truth
of its individual sentences. This is a basic assumption of analytic
philosophy when it seeks to apply models taken from formal logic to
ordinary language. But because such a method does not acknowl-
edge extended discourse as posing a new problem, like structuralism
it is forced to attempt to generate such discourse from its constitu-
tive elements, its sentences. Ricoeur wants instead to consider the
possibility that the meaning and truth of extended discourse is not
reducible to that of its individual sentences. Rather these take on
new values at the level of extended discourse, if only because they
are parts of a larger, structured whole, which is not simply the sum
of its individual parts. Therefore extended discourse calls for new
methods of interpretation in order to be understood. It is insight
into these new methods of interpretation and the understanding that
they provide that Ricoeur's hermeneutics of the fullness of language
will seek to provide.
Another important consequence of Ricoeur's linguistic turn worth
noting is that the notion of symbol will playa lesser role in his sub-
sequent work, without ever disappearing completely. What will take
its place as central to his reflections will be figurative discourse - uses
of language that cannot be captured by the model of the logical
proposition. One can see this shift occurring in the essays 'The
Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection' and 'The
Problem of Double Meaning as Hermeneutic Problem and as
Semantic Problem' in The Conflict of Interpretations. Ricoeur's point
62
is that something of the double meaning effect found in symbols also
can be found in language, especially if we attend to the fullness of
language and not limit our attention to apparently univocal sen-
tences on the basis of a comparison to logical propositions, ones that
are always either true or false and whose meaning does not change
as they recur within an argument. Natural languages contain
many meaningful sentences that do not fall under this heading. The
example of a command to jump in the lake given above is a good
example. Similarly, the order to 'close the door' is not true or false;
nor is the request: 'close the door, please' What Ricoeur will be most
interested in therefore are those instances of discourse and extended
discourse that, like symbols, mean more than one thing at a time -
poetic images, example. This will lead him to look closely at the case
of metaphor, as we shall see in the next chapter. Metaphors are like
symbols in that they contain a surplus of meaning, one that makes
use of ambiguity in a productive manner.12 Hence, if we can better
understand metaphors, we may in return be able better to
symbols, the problem Ricoeur had posed at the end of The Symbolism
of Evil.
63
CHAPTER 4
THE FULLNESS OF LANGUAGE AND
FIGURATIVE DISCOURSE
During the same period that Ricoeur was coming to terms with
structuralism and beginning to work out the contours of a workable
hermeneutic theory, he was also looking again at phenomenology,
which had provided the framework for his earlier work. What he
now saw was that phenomenology, too, had to be understood in
terms of hermeneutics and, somewhat more surprisingly, hermeneu-
tics could be shown to have a phenomenological dimension. This
insight led him to what he would now call a hermeneutic phenome-
nology. His argument for this shift in his thinking is found in the
essay titled 'Phenomenology and Hermeneutics' (FTA, 25-52). His
strategy there is worth noting. For the sake of clarity, he sets out the
contrast between Husserl's project of a transcendental phenome-
nology and his own program of a hermeneutic phenomenology in
terms of an antithetical comparison and contrast. That is, he sums
up both versions of phenomenology in terms of a set of mutually
opposing theses where one side ultimately carries the day. Then,
having laid out the basic parameters that characterize a hermeneu-
tic phenomenology, he turns to Husserl's own texts to show that such
a modification of Husserl's phenomenology is justified because it is
already implicit in them.
Early on, in his notes to his translation of Husserl's Ideas, Ricocur
had already been critical of Husserl's proposal for an idealistic
version of transcendental phenomenology as a way to refute the
possibility of radical scepticism. For Ricoeur, this solution turned
out to be still enmeshed in the subject-object model in that it made
everything depend on the subject pole. What Husserl claimed to dis-
cover was a method that was able to take philosophy to a transcen-
dental field where things appeared to a transcendental subject and
64
THE FULLNESS OF LANGUAGE AND FIGURATIVE DISCOURSE
where they could be known as what they really are. But Ricoeur saw
that this transcendental subject again was no one because it was any
one as a pure knower. Worse, Husserl's method provided no way to
get back to the world of ordinary lived experience and lived subjec-
tivity. This was because his radical method was said to work so by
setting aside every appeal to our everyday natural attitude through
a reduction that would bracket it and its assumptions about the way
the world really is, opening the way to eventual insight into the true
essence of any phenomena. But following Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur
rejected this claim in that he denied the possibility of a complete
reduction, what today we would call a leap to a 'view from nowhere'
In effect, Ricoeur held that while we can question our experience
we never completely escape the everyday lifeworld from which we
always begin. However, this does not mean completely rejecting phe-
nomenology as a useful descriptive approach that seeks to describe
things as they appear to consciousness or the ways in which we might
be conscious of them. It does mean rejecting any claim that we olin
prove conclusively that such an approach provides an exhaustive
account of lived experience, since as we have already seen from his
critique of structuralism and his longstanding claim about the non-
independence of philosophy, Ricoeur believes that there is always
more to lived experience as temporal than any theory can capture,
even while any such theory always presupposes the surplus of avail-
able meaning and the encompassing reality it refers to in attempting
to make sense of our lived experience. Phenomenological descrip-
tions for Ricoeur therefore now turn out themselves to be instances
of interpretation that presuppose the fullness of language and the
finitude of understanding. As such, they also presuppose a dialogi-
cal rather than monological understanding of language because
our language is something we first learn from others, however reflec-
tive or critical we may become of it later on. A workable theory of
knowledge or of reality therefore will not be one that begins from
the idea of an isolated ego or subject. This means that self-
consciousness must turn out to be a result rather than the starting
point of philosophy.
Ricoeur further develops this move to a hermeneutical model of
understanding through a consideration of the history of hermeneu-
tics in light of his analysis of the model of the text considered in the
previous chapter. He does so without ever developing what could be
called a complete hermeneutic theory, at least not in the sense of a
65
manual for interpretation. This is not to say that he is unable to make
significant contributions to such a theory. His own examination of
the history of hermeneutics convinces him, for example, that the
dichotomy between explanation and understanding, inherited from
Wilhelm Dilthey in the nineteenth century, was a false dichotomy.
For hermeneutics, understanding is a presupposition of any explana-
tory scheme, as well as its goal. That is, interpretation always moves
from some pre-comprehension or understanding toward the idea of
increased understanding. Explanation is a means to enhance such
understanding in that it introduces a critical objective moment. The
relation between understanding and explanation, in other words, has
to be conceived of as dialectical with explanation as the mediating
term between two poles of understanding. This is an insight that
was to have large consequences for not only Ricoeur's critique of
structuralism and all other disciplines claiming to yield objective
knowledge, but also for his own reflections on language and those
disciplines such as history where the question of the objective status
of the knowledge they produced was taken to be an open question,
especially when compared to th,e alleged objective status of the
knowledge produced by the natural sciences.
For our purposes, it is important to see how Ricoeur uses this
developing hermeneutic theory in pursuing his own basic question
of how to do philosophy starting from the fullness of language.
What is unique about his approach to language following his own
hermeneutic and linguistic turn is that he proceeds not by concen-
trating on language that can be translated into forms amenable to
analysis using the model of symbolic logic, but by concentrating
instead on those uses of language, like symbolic discourse, which are
resistant to such analysis. The main focus of his investigations, in
other words, is now on what he now recognized as modes of figura-
tive discourse. Such uses of language carry with them something like
the double-meaning structure of symbols, but they are not bound to
life as strictly as symbols are. In both cases, though, we ultimately
run into a limit to philosophical reflection with the question whether
the meaning found should be said to be something we invent or
something we discover. In fact, what is clear in the case of figurative
discourse - and what makes it worth considering - is that it can be
considered as language that says something for the first time.
Figurative discourse, therefore, can be a source of new meaning or
of what Ricoeur will call semantic innovation. This is something he
66
did not find taken up either by structuralism or by the analytic phi-
losophy of language that focused on those uses of language trans-
latable into logical propositions or assertions, where the meaning is
taken to be not only fixed over time but also already known - or at
least already there ready to be discovered. Ricoeur instead focuses
his attention on those cases of discourse where this assumption can
be said not to apply, to instances of live metaphor, for example, but
also beyond such live metaphors, to those forms of extended dis-
course like history, literature and the Bible that not only can be inter-
preted as saying something novel but also as making a meaningful
claim to truth.
METAPHOR AS A PRIME CASE OF FIGURATIVE DISCOURSE
Ricoeur begins his discussion of metaphor by returning to Aristotle,
who had already discussed metaphor in his Poetics and his book on
rhetoric. Aristotle considered rhetoric and poetic discourse - e-fen
given their use of metaphor and other figurative forms - to overlap
logic because of the appeal to some form of argumentation they
both include. This emphasis on argument is important because
rhetorical argument introduces the idea of creativity (in the sense of
finding a persuasive argument) as well as drawing on an idea of
proof. Poetry, too, is creative, but unlike logic 'does not seek to prove
anything at all: its project is mimetic; its aim is to compose an
essential representation of human actions' (RM, 13).1 Metaphor, as
a form of semantic innovation, plays a role both in rhetoric, consid-
ered as a theory of argumentation, and in poetry and drama like the
Greek tragedies, which Aristotle held are actually truer than history
because they show us not so much how things are but how they must
be. In both uses of language, metaphor works with already existing
language into which it introduces a 'twist' or deviation that makes it
say something new; hence the semantic innovation in metaphor itself
depends on the use of language, on discourse as Ricoeur defines it.
This transgressive or transformative aspect of metaphor is what
makes it capable of creating new meaning by disturbing the existing
logical order at the same time that it begets it in a new form. It does
so, as Aristotle had already recognized, because it makes us 'see'
things differently, not by imitating them in the sense of producing a
copy but by redescribing them. This is why metaphor has a referen-
tial and ultimately an ontological as well as a creative function.
67
The later rhetorical tradition reduced Aristotle's theory to a theory
of tropes (or figures of speech) understood as the deviant use of a
word. Metaphors here were considered to be either a decorative sub-
stitution for what could be said straightforwardly or as a more or less
concealed form of comparison: my love is like a rose. But if this is the
case, then all metaphors can be translated into already existing literal
assertions. They really do not say anything new; they only say some-
thing already known in a different way. Ricoeur holds this is why
rhetoric finally lost its position among the core disciplines. It turned
into a system of nomenclature for all the different tropes it identified,
but then it could do nothing more than list them when they occurred.
Ricoeur's own account of metaphor argues that it is a mistake to con-
ceive of metaphor as merely a deviant use of words. Metaphor
belongs to the level of discourse, hence minimally to the level of the
sentence. This means that it has to be understood in terms of predi-
cation, not simply in terms of one term being substituted for another.
Moreover, live metaphors involve an odd kind of predication. They
say both 'is' and 'is not' at the same time! This is why they cannot be
translated into logical propositions or directly understood using
techniques applicable to such assertions which assume th,at a state-
ment says either something is or is not the case. Ina live metaphor it
is as if there is a tension between the subject and predicate of the
metaphor. This insight leads to an interaction theory for which
neither an appeal to substitution nor an explanation in terms of some
form of comparison is adequate to explain fully this tension. When
a metaphor is a live metaphor, not a dead one (for example, the 'leg
of a chair'), what the metaphor says cannot be immediately trans-
lated into already existing concepts. It requires an adjustment in our
understanding and our already existing language that makes us, as
Aristotle had already said, 'see' things differently. Here is an example
of such a still live metaphorical discourse from Shakespeare cited by
Ricoeur that nicely illustrates this point:
Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,
A great-sized monster of ingratitude.
Those scraps are good deeds past, which are devoured
As fast as they are made, forgot as soon
as done.
Troilus and Cressida, II, 3, 11.145-50 (cited in IT, 98 n.6)
68
We can say that this passage is about 'time as a beggar' or as an all-
devouring monster, but obviously that only begins to capture what
is said here - and time in the end is not simply a beggar or a monster.
Later the semantic innovation of some live metaphors will be
absorbed into the dictionary (as with the example of the chair's leg),
but at first while we can paraphrase the metaphor, we cannot simply
translate it without remainder into already existing words. This is why
live metaphors are a source of semantic innovations, ones that can be
identified and reidentified as meaningful. Such metaphors also have
a referential dimension. They say something new about reality. The
kind of resemblance they bear to reality is not simply comparative,
however. Using another metaphor - all theories of metaphor, Ricoeur
sees, eventually make use of metaphor - Ricoeur says that what is at
issue here is a kind of 'iconic augmentation' that is not reducible
simply to being an image. The augmentation that occurs is more like
what happened with the invention of oil paints and the effect they had
on the history of art or with the phonetic alphabet and its const-
quences for writing. Oil paintings were still pictures, but in a funda-
mentally different manner than what had preceded them. As Ricoeur
says, using still another metaphor, 'the metaphorical meaning is not
the semantic clash' within the metaphorical predication 'but the new
pertinence that answers its challenge. The metaphor is what forms
a meaningful self-contradictory statement from a self-destructive self-
contradictory statement' (RM, 194). The ontological resemblance,
therefore, occurs on the semantic plane in such a way that sameness
and difference are operative there at the same time. This resemblance
involves a verbal aspect but also goes beyond it by fusing sound, sense,
the sensible, and even feeling.2 An image, it turns out, is the end of the
metaphorical process, not its beginning. In this way, live metaphor
suspends our ordinary way of referring to reality in favour of a
second-order reference that redescribes reality. But this redescription
is itself always another interpretation of the way things really are.
There is a sense of truth at work here that is itself metaphorical. It
operates as a kind of manifestation rather than as a simple relation of
correspondence or coherence. As a heuristic fiction that can lead to
new understanding, such metaphorical truth may even be said to be
the ground for truth as correspondence or coherence.
Ricoeur's philosophy of metaphor skirts paradox when it con-
cludes that 'there is no other way to do justice to the notion of
metaphorical truth than to include the critical incision of the (literal)
69
"is not" within the ontological vehemence of the (metaphorical) "is" ,
(RM, 255). It will be up to speculative discourse, that is, to philoso-
phy as conceptual discourse, to try to make sense of this by moving
beyond figurative discourse to a new level of language. Such philo-
sophical discourse will draw on hermeneutic phenomenology in
its work. When it comes to ontology, though, it will always run up
against the fact that there is more than one way to talk of being. We
can put this more clearly by saying that while philosophy cannot avoid
ontology, any ontology it proposes will itself always be an interpreta-
tion of being that maps onto a grid defined by two orthogonal axes:
the one running between the particular and the general, the other
between the abstract and concrete. Ricoeur does not develop this
claim about a possible hermeneutic ontology at length. What he does
say is that something like Aristotle's theory of the analogy of being
can be helpful in making sense of this idea of a hermeneutic ontology
because of the way such an analogy mediates between, on one side,
sheer equivocity and what, at the other extreme, aims to be purely uni-
vocal, essential predication. He concludes, however, that 'the concep-
tual unity capable of encompassing the ordered diversity of the
meanings of being remains to be thought' (RM, 277).
Getting to such conceptual thought clearly requires going beyond
the theory of metaphor. In saying this, Ricoeur holds against
Nietzsche and deconstructive theories of metaphor like that of
Jacques Derrida that concepts are not just dead metaphors. This is
why his next step will be to say that philosophy that tries to think
starting from myth and figurative or poetic discourse must also rec-
ognize and incorporate the fact that there are other kinds of dis-
course with their own semantic aims. If it does this, it can then begin
to consider not only these different forms of discourse but also the
ways in which they intersect and interact with one another. It will do
so by drawing on our ability to use language to reflect on itself as well
as on what we seek to bring language, human action and the world
in which it occurs. This brings us to Ricoeur's next contribution
toward a philosophy that takes seriously the fullness of language, his
theory of narrative discourse.
NARRATIVE DISCOURSE
Ricoeur's theory of narrative is one of his more developed and influ-
ential contributions to knowledge. It extends over the three volumes
70
of Time and Narrative along with a number of essays that address
portions of this topic or serve to work out the groundwork for these
volumes. Narrative is initially of interest to Ricoeur not only as a
form of extended discourse but also because, as we have already
seen, myth is a form of narrative, so the passage through narrative
is one way that may be able to help us learn to think-starting from
the symbols of the Fault and of Transcendence that get expressed in
myths about them. Beyond this, however, Ricoeur now further
argues that it is necessary for a philosophy based on the fullness of
language to consider narrative discourse for itself because this use
of language is closely related to questions about time and history,
questions that he had argued structuralism could not really deal
with. His own thesis he tells us will be that 'time becomes human
time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narra-
tive; narrative, in turn, is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the
features of temporal experience' (T &N 1 :3). He states this thesis on
the first page of Time and Narrative indicating that he does not t1\ean
this work to be read as a long argument leading up to the discovery
of a conclusion. Because they state their basic thesis on the first
page, these volumes are to be read instead as a plea for this thesis, a
plea that like pleadings in a law court calls for a judgement for ~
against it on the reader's part. This form of argumentation is neces-
sary because, as Ricoeur will argue in volume three of this work, all
philosophical attempts to make sense of time finally pay the price of
new aporias, new questions, for any gains they make. Hence there
can be no final theoretical answer to the meaning of time, only prac-
tical ones like those that make use of narrative to tell the story of
human action, and of the world in which it occurs.
Ricoeur begins his plea for narrative by setting the problem
through readings drawn from Augustine and Aristotle. These show
that historically there have been two fundamental ways of conceiv-
ing of time, one subjective (Augustine) and one objective (Aristotle).
Yet neither thinker is really able to connect these two ideas of time,
although there are hints of the other's theory to be found in each of
them. It will turn out to be the job of historical time to connect these
two ideas of time through that of a human time, a historical time that
is the time of our existence and our experience, but also a time that
encompasses and overflows them. To make this claim convincing,
though, Ricoeur needs first to consider the nature of narrative in the
most abstract sense more closely because his case will be that the way
71
we express such historical time is fundamentally through narrative
considered in terms of both its primary forms: history and fiction.
What distinguishes narrative as a form of discourse is that it
always has a plot. This plot does something; it combines the episodes
and the overall story told into a meaningful whole. It does so
through the plot's capacity to reconfigure into narrative what was
already configured in language prior to narrative through the con-
ceptual network that allows us already to speak meaningfully about
human action. This conceptual network is a very heterogeneous one.
It includes concepts such as reason for, cause, motive, action and
passion, work, agent, patient, goal, and so on. These concepts can
already be combined into action sentences that are open-ended. We
can say, for example, that 'Brutus stabbed Caesar in the forum on the
Ides of March with a knife in order to In this way, these con-
cepts give us a nomenclature (murder, assassination) that already
names different actions or their possible components, where such
names are always tied to specific languages and cultures. This is why
ordinary language can already refer to and talk of action at this
level. What narrative does is that it takes such discourse, which is
already mimetic in that it signifies or 'figures' action in language, and
adds new discursive features to it that give it a new meaning by
turning it into the story of 'doing something'. At the same time, nar-
rative provides the possibility of extended discourse about action,
discourse that goes beyond the level of individual action sentences
to talk about things happening not only in time but also over time,
including their possible long-term and even previously unseen con-
sequences. Narrative does this by telling a story about human action
and its meaning. This story, in turn, can be heard or read, and when
understood contributes to refiguring our understanding of human
action and its possibilities. This new form of semantic innovation
occurs because narrative grafts new temporal elements to the pre-
narrative figurations of action and through them to our under-
standing of both human action and time itself. It will be the task of
a hermeneutics of narrative discourse to reconstruct and thereby
make intelligible this whole sequence from lived experience to nar-
rative back to lived experience again.
One way in which narrative contributes to a new understanding of
time is that it brings together the 'dialectic of coming to be, having
been, and making present' (T&N, 1:61). In this way, time is entirely
desubstantialized in favour of an understanding of time, not as one
72
thing among others, but as that within which we exist. This time can
be partially understood because it is both a datable and a public
time. As Heidegger had already said in Being and Time, it is on this
basis that we learn to reckon with time. Narrative works here by
introducing mediations between the individual events, incidents or
episodes in the plot and the story taken as a whole. In so doing,
it makes use of a wide range of heterogeneous elements including
agents, goals, means, interactions, circumstances, reversals, and even
unexpected results. In other words, the plot constitutive of narrative
combines a chronological and a non-chronological dimension into
one meaningful whole by extracting a configuration from a follow-
able succession of events. This configured succession leads finally to
what Frank Kermode has called the sense of an ending where a new
quality of time emerges, a meaningful time that encompasses both
cosmic and lived time in a human time marked by something like a
discordant concordance. There is discordance because what narra-
tive says as such never reduces to simply an atemporal idea, but tl!:re
is concordance because this temporal discord is not ultimately
chaotic. In narrative discourse, therefore, we may find a refigured
time that in the best of cases helps us make better sense of the ordi-
nary everyday time of our lives as well as of its limit situations. These
enhanced understandings of time and human action may themselves
subsequently give rise to new forms of narrative configurations.
What is more, such enhanced understanding may in turn give rise to
better understanding of reality itself as temporal. As Ricoeur puts
it, 'making a narrative re-signifies the world in its temporal dimen-
sion, to the extent that narrating, telling, reciting is to remake action
following the poem's invitation' (T&N, 1:81), where this world and
the action referred to was already signified by language about our
actions at the pre-narrative level. Hence, even if time itself is never
directly observed, it can be narrated, and in being narrated it can be
understood in a practical way.
Having said this about narrative in general, Ricoeur next turns to
consideration of its two major branches: history and fiction, to show
that both are included within this more general understanding of
narrative. He also wants to show how they contribute in their own
way to the configuration and refiguration of time that is at issue in
Time and Narrative.
He makes a number of distinct yet related points in his considera-
tion of history. One such claim is that history in the sense of what the
73
historian produces - a history book - depends on and is aimed at our
narrative understanding, our ability to produce and understand nar-
ratives. This is an important point because behind it lies the question
whether there can be such a thing as a non-narrative history. Ricoeur
situates this discussion in relation to the French Annales group of his-
torians who aimed their investigations at what they called the total
historical fact and, in practice, at those aspects of history that
changed only slowly over time or that repeated themselves, in con-
trast to what they saw as less significant, more momentary historical
events on the political plane. Their perspective brought them close to
structuralism, although they never were willing to give up completely
the claim that history always makes some reference to time. For them
this time was always a long time span. This focus on long time spans
allowed them in turn to deny that they were producing what they
called a history of events. Ricoeur's argument in relation to this kind
of history, therefore, takes two major paths. First, he argues that all
history in the sense of the history text a historian produces is ulti-
mately narrative, and hence derived from some understanding of
time and human action, even when at the limit it makes use of some-
thing more like a quasi-plot or even quasi-characters or historical
actors. This is the case, for example, with Fernand Braudel's The
Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the-Age of Philip II
where the Mediterranean Sea itself functions as the main 'character'
This is because even a history of social institutions and trade routes
derives from a concern with human beings as agents and with their
actions. Secondly, the Annales historians' attack on the concept of
event, taken necessarily (and uncritically) to be something short term
and even ephemeral, leads Ricoeur to see that a philosophical con-
sideration of narrative points to another still more important idea
regarding what constitutes an event, an idea that stands in contrast
to the events considered by the natural sciences. This is the idea of a
narrative event, an event that occurs in a narrative and contributes to
its unfolding. It is an event, on whatever time scale it may require, that
can be recognized and understood as an event only in relation to its
being part of some narrative. Ricoeur adds that there is a dialectical
relation at work here: the event only exists in relation to the narrative
and the narrative depends for its existence on the event, which need
not be short term or long term but rather is specified by its marking
either a beginning or a change of course or an ending within the nar-
rative. As such, unlike a scientific event, which is usually abstract and
74
general (water freezes at a certain temperature), the narrative event is
both concrete (something specific happens) and also exemplary or
generalizable (as when we say that Caesar crossed the Rubicon
and mean that a political entity, Republican Rome, was doomed to
fall), albeit without ever being completely reducible to being the con-
sequence of some universal law.
Because historians deal with specific occurrences, not universal
ones, Ricoeur is also led to consider the role of explanation in
history. This had been the subject of a long philosophical discussion
following attempts to define scientific explanation in terms of a
deductive model by logical positivism. But even these philosophers
saw that historians did not really appeal to such a model. However,
they then worried that this meant that history could not really be
considered a science or give us truth equivalent to that provided by
the natural sciences. Ricoeur enters this debate from the perspective
of the question in what ways do historians in fact claim to explfl-in
what happened in the past. He agrees with those who seek to defe"hd
history as explanatory, in that ordinary language gives us many ways
to say 'because' - for example, in terms of reasons and motives as in
the philosophy of action, but also in terms of singular casual or
quasi-causal explanations, or even in terms of subsequent events
through teleological explanations. In fact, narrative itself always
conveys an explanatory sense in that the story it tells is followable
and holds together at the end. When we get to the end, we can look
back and see that this story does lead to this ending.
We can see what is at issue here more clearly if we consider the
difference between a chronicle, which simply lists things that hap-
pened, and a narrative, which implies a connection between them.
That is, we may find in a medieval chronicle an entry that says the
king died and another on a later page that says the queen died. But
something else happens when we have a text that says, 'The king died
and shortly thereafter the queen died of grief.' It is as though the one
thing after another turns into one thing because of another. Time
enters into play here in that one event cited is prior to another. In
fact, as Arthur Danto has shown, historians often make use of an
even more sophisticated narrative sentence form when they say
things like 'in 1717 the author of Rameau's Nephew was born' No
one in 1717 could say or know this. And beyond this, the narrative
voice that speaks this sentence itself postdates the appearance of
Diderot's book. It is as though a present voice speaks of a past event
75
(a 'now', in the sense of a point on the time line) in terms of a future
event (another 'now', as another point on the time line that comes
after the first one) that itself lies in the past of the narrative voice
speaking from its own 'now' (which presents itself as a lived present
of an instance of discourse, as well as being itself a point in time).
An important implication here for any philosophy of time is that the
possible relations among past, present and future are not simply the
same as that between 'before' and 'after' Another important impli-
cation is that history in the sense of what historians do itself depends
on some knowledge of subsequent events. This is why there is no
history of the present. Indeed, since time continues to pass, so too
new subsequent events continue to occur and the work of historical
explanation is constantly reopened. Because of this, we must say
that historical knowledge itself is always revisable and extensible.
Narrative with its plot itself therefore is explanatory in important
ways. Ricoeur argues against Hayden White that this does not mean
that history turns out to be a kind of fiction. Historians are depen-
dent on their appeal to historical documents and to remaining traces
of the past that actually happened. This is a point that Ricoeur will
expand upon further in his Memory, History, Forgetting. But neither
is history as recounted a story that simply tells itself. It has a poetic
dimension because the history text is something'Itlade. This is why
Ricoeur will conclude that when the narrative being told breaks
down or begins to spin its wheels is when historians introduce more
explicit forms of explanation, including appeals to general rules, in
order to keep the story going. But, in so doing, we must recognize
that they always aim at the truth of what can be known about the
past. In the language of phenomenology, they always intend to tell
us what can be known about what actually happened, but consistent
with a hermeneutical perspective this will always be an interpreta-
tion of the past subject to possible critique and revision. In effect,
the historian seeks to explain more in order to understand better,
another hermeneutical claim.
Ricoeur concludes that he has shown that history does belong to
the narrative field as defined by its configuring operation. But it is not
sufficient simply to equate history with the genus 'story': 'the specif-
ically historical property of history is preserved by the ties, however
tenuous and well-hidden they may be, which continue to connect his-
torical explanation to our narrative understanding, despite the epis-
temological break separating the first from the second' (T &N, 1 :228).
76
We can even say that historical narrative shows us new possibilities
for narrative understanding in that it can push the basic model to the
use of things like a quasi-plot and quasi-characters when we write
not directly of human action but of things like the Mediterranean
world during a certain long period of time.
Fiction, as the other great species of narrative, gives us further
insight into how narrative configures and ultimately refigures time.
Ricoeur takes up a number of different points in considering fiction,
but in each case they are meant to add support for his basic thesis
about the relation of time and narrative. First of all, he looks at the
specific question of time in fictional narrative by noting that the list
of possible narrative genres is not closed. This is demonstrated by
the discovery (or invention) of the novel as a new way of writing
fiction. The novel is noteworthy for its variety when it comes to
actual instances, but more generally Ricoeur notes that in compari-
son to earlier forms, including drama as in Greek tragedy, the novel
extends the social sphere in which its action unfolds by paying atten-
tion to ordinary people. It also introduces a greater emphasis on
characters as individuals whom we might think of as real people
rather than simple ideal or mythical types like the hero or the villain.
With this comes an increasing emphasis on social and psychological
complexity, combined with new ways of conveying inwardness, cul-
minating in the twentieth century with the stream of consciousness
novel. 'Yet nothing in these successive expansions of character at the
expense of the plot escapes the formal principle of configuration
and therefore the concept of emplotment' (T &N 2: 1 0). What is even
more significant about the novel, however, is that it leads to new
developments in narrative technique in that this is a genre of narra-
tive that constantly struggles against being reduced to a fixed set of
conventions at the same time it confronts readers with the question:
are we faced with illusion or resemblance to reality in fiction?
Ricoeur's reply to this question leads him to shift from his earlier use
of the idea of 'redescription' to characterize what happens with live
metaphor to the idea of 'reconfiguration' in order to make sense of
what happens through narrative when it is heard or read and under-
stood. This is because like all narrative, fiction presents us with a
world of the text in which the story is understood to unfold, and this
is a world we can imagine ourselves as inhabiting. Hence, on this
basis, narrative fiction is a way of seeing the world differently, but
also in ways that may be true of the world as it actually is or might
77
be. For this reason, any theory of narrative, like the theory of
metaphor, has at some point to confront the question of truth.
Ricoeur suggests, provocatively, the possibility that just as there is a
truth of history as narrated, so too there can be a truth of fiction
where this is a truth that operates at the level of extended discourse,
not at that of the sentence. This is a truth that is not reducible to the
logical conjunction of the truth values of its individual sentences,
which is why a hermeneutics of the text is required to make sense of
it. To see this further, however, we have to move beyond fiction to the
point where it rejoins history under the larger heading of narrative
discourse.
First, though, Ricoeur has more to say about fiction and its pos-
sibilities. He considers, for example, the question whether we might
think that the developments in narrative technique can ever be
exhausted, a question that arises as soon as we recognize they can
change. His reply is that we have no way of conceiving such a thing,
since it would leave us with no coherent way to make further sense
of time. Indeed, 'we have no idea of what a culture would be where
no one any longer knew what it meant to narrate things' (T &N 2:28).
Next he turns to newer developments in structuralism where, under
the heading of narratology, it seeks to account for every particular
narrative as the surface manifestation of an underlying deep struc-
ture that can be shown to generate this surface structure. This was a
new development in that the goal of structural analysis is no longer
simply to identify structures, but also to relate them in terms of a
basic structure and other ones derived from it. This is again a kind
of hermeneutics of suspicion to Ricoeur's eyes. That is, for narra-
tology, the narrative we first read or hear is not really what we have
to understand if we are to make sense of the story told. That is
rather the deep structure that gives rise to - explains - this story.
Apparently, at the limit, if only we can dig deep enough, there is a
basic structure that generates every narrative as a surface manifes-
tation of this deeper reality. Ricoeur's basic argument against the
leading attempts to develop such a narratology is that at some point
they all invoke or presuppose the surface structure they seek to gen-
erate. That is, by starting from the narrative told it may be possible
to postulate underlying structures that help us better understand this
narrative, but we cannot finally make the move in the other direc-
tion, starting solely from these deep structures up to the narrative.
This is because all such structures are static. They are unable to
78
account for the temporal dimension of narrative that is essential to
its plot, which depends on change. This is why Ricoeur formulates
his critique by saying that 'somewhere the logic must be inadequate
to the creativity proper to narrative' (T &N 2:59).
This brings him to the key point he wants to make about fiction
as a form of narrative: it allows us to play games with time, to think
of time, to understand it in new and different ways. One way to see
this is to consider the use of verb tenses in narrative. In a typical his-
torical narrative we find, for example, the form we call the historical
present, narration written in the present tense that reads as though
it were in the past ('our hero draws his sword'). Fiction allows us to
do much more than this, however. In reading a novel or short story
we are not surprised to find a sentence that says 'tomorrow was
Christmas' This is because, as with the example of the historical
narrative sentence form cited earlier, we take for granted that there
is a narrative voice here speaking from a present about a past future
in relation to a passed past. A literary critic might even point dbt
here that a good contemporary writer can use such free indirect dis-
course or narrated monologue to make this narrative voice itself
seem to be that of a character in the past rather than in the narra-
tive present. But what most interests Ricoeur is how these games
with tenses do not completely break with the use of verb tenses in
ordinary language yet do reveal new possible meaningful uses of
them and, through them, new ways of making sense of human
action thanks to the variations they work on such key notions as
point of view and narrative voice. They do so in part by varying the
relations between a first- and third-person perspective and between
the narrator and his or her characters. As the Russian critic Mikhail
Bakhtin has shown, it is even possible to write a polyphonic novel in
which it is impossible to distinguish one overall narrator, one where
each character seems to speak for him- or herself.
In all these ways, fiction becomes a way of articulating new expe-
riences of time, fictive experiences that have a world of the text as
their horizon, a world that helps us in the best cases better to under-
stand our own world. Ricoeur demonstrates this by consider-
ing three novels that can themselves be considered tales about time:
Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dal!oway, Thomas Mann's The Magic
Mountain, and Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. In the
first of these great novels we find, for example, a clash between
mortal time and monumental time, the time of everyday occurrences
79
and that of great political events and power. In the second, the dis-
tance between the time of narration and the time narrated is
stretched so that we get a glimpse of an eternal time, that of the
magic mountain which stands above everyday events, but not quite
completely since the story ends with the beginning of what the
reader recognizes as the outbreak of World War I and the hero's
descent from the mountain. Finally, in Proust, we find a story that is
itself a narrative of coming to terms with time by recognizing finally
how to turn it into a story, one that moves from lost and misunder-
stood time to regained, understood time, from lived to narrated
experience. In none of these cases, however, are the general features
of fiction, and through them of narrative, completely abolished.
'This is why the novel has only made infinitely more complex the
problems of emplotment' (T&N, 2:155). Saying is still a form of
doing, 'even when the saying takes refuge in the voiceless discourse
of a silent thought, which the novelist does not hesitate to narrate'
(T&N,2:156).
Fiction and history next need to be brought together in a theory
that will give equal rights to both forms, something that Ricoeur
seeks to do in the third volume of Time and Narrative. However, fic-
tional narrative is usually richer in the information it gives us about
time than is historical narrative, which itself always also conveys
some such understanding. These fictive understandings of time,
found in both fiction and history, can in turn be related to ways of
being in the world and to human action because they start from
already constituted understandings of the world and action, as these
are found in existing ordinary languages. But, at least in the best
cases, they also go beyond such understanding to the possibility of
new understanding and new meaning not only regarding the world
and human action, but also about time itself without ever exhaust-
ing its mystery.
This is why Ricoeur begins his third volume on narrative by
looking at leading philosophical theories of time, in order to show
that in each case they leave something unresolved or give rise to new
problems. It is to these failures of speculative thought that narrative
can provide at least a practical solution. It does so when it succeeds
in talking meaningfully about time, without accounting for it fully.
Narrative does this by taking time as human time, a time that stems
from the interweaving of acting and suffering in the story told. In the
case of history, this human time can be related to historical time, a
80
time that mediates between lived and cosmic time by rein scribing
lived time on cosmic time. What fiction contributes are imaginative
variations on these historical and human times, variations that may
generate new narrative techniques that historians in turn will learn
to incorporate into their narratives.
Historical time also draws on an already existing understanding
of what we can call mythic time, which is a form of discourse about
time that says something like 'once in the beginning in those
days' But historical time goes beyond this undated and undatable
time by drawing on three conditions of possibility. The first of these
is the calendar. A calendar makes possible an overall scansion of
time by referring different dates to a common zero point or axis -
usually some important founding event - and by allowing different
periods of time to be ordered in relation to this origin either in terms
of their duration, or as cycles, or as recurring biological or social
rhythms. The calendar therefore is what allows us to say not only
that one event came before or after another event, but also to refate
the narrative present of the voice saying this to both these events in
terms of a common time. This 'now point' of speaking about things
in time, however, is not just any point on the time line; it is a lived
present or the representation of such a lived present, which is why
historical time combines both cosmic and lived time. This lived
present, in turn, may be thought of as a new beginning. As Ricoeur
says, 'If we did not have the phenomenological notion of the
present, as the "today" in terms of which there is a "tomorrow" and
a "yesterday," we would not be able to make any sense of the idea of
a new event that breaks with a previous era, inaugurating a course
of events wholly different from what preceded it' (T&N, 3:107).
The second condition of possibility of historical time is the ideas
of a generation and of a succession of generations. A generation is
what sorts people into contemporaries, predecessors and successors,
while joining them together, adding a note of biological and mortal
time to that of the public time of the calendar, at the same time that
it enriches the possible senses of tradition and innovation already
operative at the level of the calendar. Finally, the idea of historical
time requires the combined notions of archives, documents and
traces, which provide an evidentiary basis for talking about what has
happened in historical time. Archives are deposits of historical doc-
uments of every kind that historians make use of in their research,
where these documents are the ultimate means of proof for what
81
historians discover and say. 'They nourish its claim to be based on
facts' (T&N, 3:117). They do so because documents, whatever form
they may take, are traces of the past, where the idea of a trace carries
a double sense associated with its being a physical sign of the past.
That is, a trace is something in the present from the past that signi-
fies the past and something that happened in the past; hence it com-
bines both a material and an ideational aspect as a sign-effect. What
happened in the past has passed away, but it left a trace, a trace that
remains in the present and that can be read as referring to the past
event that created or left this trace. When we combine these three
conditions of possibility of historical time we can explore this time
and the connections among things in it both backwards and for-
wards, and narrate these movements in the history text.
Fiction also makes use of this idea of historical time without nec-
essarily being bound to one version of it, for fiction can create its
own imaginative historical time just as it can create its own imagi-
native world. It does so by neutralizing historical time and playing
with its possibilities. It may even try to work with more than one time
at a time, so that fictive temponil experiments cannot be totalized.
There always seem to be new possibilities to explore, including those
aporias philosophies of time run into. Yet as with the historians'
time, Ricoeur holds that the time of fiction always 'stands for' some-
thing that is ultimately both real and human, something it helps
us make sense of and understand. Fiction can even try to explore
the boundaries of our experience of time and of any idea of time,
including time's other, eternity. In so doing, it helps us make sense of
the boundary between literature or history and myth. This is why it
can speak of time the artist with Proust or time the monster who
devours everything with Shakespeare.
History and fiction we can thus say actually interweave in that
they draw upon each other within the larger field of narrative dis-
course. And they do so in ways that have both epistemological and
ontological implications and resonances. Ricoeur recognizes one
important implication at this point that will be important for his
subsequent work. This is the idea of a narrative identity in the sense
of a personal or communal identity expressed and even constituted
through the narratives that speak of it. He will return to it in his con-
cluding remarks to Time and Narrative and then take it up in depth
in his next major work, Oneself as Another, which we shall consider
in our next chapter. Before that, however, he needs to complete his
82
consideration of narrative discourse by adding to it a theory of
reading. To this point he has tried to focus his attention on structures
internal to all narrative; we might even say his focus is on the objec-
tive structures of any narrative. But he needs also to show how we
appropriate such objective structures. This happens, he claims, when
the world of the text is taken up in the reader's imagination through
reading, a process that has been discussed extensively by literary
critics, but one that is also open to phenomenological description.
One point especially worth mentioning here is that this process is
facilitated by the fact that narratives can be shown to contain an
implicit reader among their rhetorical devices and aesthetic aims.
Sometimes this is very evident as when a narrator directly addresses
his or her 'gentle reader'; other times it is done more subtly. In either
case, however, this suggests that a text can shape its reader and help
contribute to a possible narrative identity in the sense just referred
to. Consideration of reading also shows why it is possible to write a
history of reception of a text and why this history may be said ~ be
part of the meaning of that text insofar as that history affects a con-
temporary reading. Finally, any theory of reading must address the
fact that we also like to reread some texts or to hear a story again,
even when we already know the outcome. In a word, this is again
because reading appeals to our imagination, and through our imag-
ination we find pleasure in exploring the world of the text under-
stood as one we might or should inhabit. It is on this basis that
Ricoeur ends Time and Narrative with a discussion of its implica-
tions for a hermeneutics of historical consciousness, a hermeneutics
that takes seriously not only that we live in time but that we ourselves
are temporal. This will not lead to something similar to what Hegel
called absolute knowledge. In this respect, Ricoeur sets aside his
earlier appeal to Hegel in his interpretation of Freud, even while he
holds on to something of Freud, in that he says that giving up this
dream of absolute knowledge itself requires a work of mourning.
What a hermeneutics of historical consciousness shows instead is
that while we always are affected by the past, we are not completely
determined by it. Through our narrative understanding we can think
about time and be critical of what we do know of it, as well as of
what happens in it. This does not call for utopian fantasies or exis-
tential dread, but rather for historical hope, an insight that points
back to the beginnings of Ricoeur's philosophizing and forward to
his concern for ethics and a just society.
83
Before leaving the question of narrative discourse, Ricoeur him-
self looks back on what he has accomplished. We remember that he
had begun with a thesis that he sought to make intelligible and
acceptable. Now he sees that aporias still remain, even when we say
that 'there can be no thought about time without narrated time'
(T &N, 3:341). The first of these aporias has to do with the just men-
tioned idea of a narrative identity. Subjects recognize themselves in
the stories they tell about themselves. This is an inevitably circular
relation it would seem, but it may also be one that points to the limits
on the answer narration brings to the questions posed by temporal-
ity. For narrative identity is not seamless or completely stable, nor
does it, Ricoeur now acknowledges, exhaust the question of what it
is to be a subject, either as someone who can maintain him- or
herself as a self over and through time or as the possible plural
subject of action of a group or community or political entity. In fact,
such narrative identity usually appeals more to the imagination than
to the will, which is why the question of ethics will have to be
addressed further.
Next, narrative never is able to totalize time completely. It always
works in terms of beginnings and endings, even when the beginning
comes at the end. Thus while historical consciousness can be said to
hold together an awareness of past, present and future, as just stated
it never reduces them to something like Hegel's atemporal absolute
knowledge. Historical consciousness always is starting over again
because it itself is fundamentally a temporal form of understand-
ing and self-understanding. Finally, we must say that time itself is
inscrutable. Every attempt to escape time or to constitute it 'reveals
itself as belonging to a constituted order always already presupposed
by the work of constitution' (T&N, 3:261); it itself always takes place
within time. The sense of being 'in' time at issue here remains prob-
lematic, more like a mystery than anything like a problem that can
one day be resolved. It is as if we were inside a gigantic windowless
room that we had never been outside of, of which we have no idea
that there is an outside, or if we do have some such idea, the very
effort to think of it as 'outside' inevitably must lead us back to myth
or some form of poetic language in order to express this. Yet these
limits are also ones that narrative itself tries to explore from the
inside, so to speak. It does so by trying to speak of time's other in
forms that may range from songs of praise to lamentation. It does so,
paradoxically, by confessing its own limitations.
84
OTHER FORMS OF DISCOURSE
Ricoeur does not try to expand these reflections on narrative dis-
course to anything like a general theory of possible types of dis-
course. Still, we may want to ask, for example, given this theory of
language, how many kinds of discourse can we identify? And what
are their specific characteristics? Ricoeur does, however, say some
things about certain other leading forms of discourse that are worth
noting. We have already noted his few comments on philosophical
discourse, which aims to be conceptual, hence univocal discourse,
language used to say exactly what it intends to say. This would be a
form of discourse that somehow escapes the polysemy of words in
the dictionary, the fact that most words there have more than one
meaning. It would also eliminate the plurivocity of discourse at the
level of the sentence and beyond, the fact that it can be read in more
than one way since the perspective of a hermeneutics of suspicion is
always a part of the hermeneutical field. But since such philosophi-
cal discourse is also the discourse we use to formulate our theory of
discourse, any attempt to theorize about it further will rapidly run
into questions of circularity or of an all-encompassing totality, one
that paradoxically would include itself, something like Hegel's phi-
losophy of absolute knowledge which Ricoeur rejects. We must say
therefore that philosophical discourse for Ricoeur is always incom-
plete. At best, we can wager that it is on the way to an ideal it can
specify but never quite reach. This may explain why he has so little
to say about it, other than to seek to protect it from attempts to
reduce philosophy to something other than itself while at the same
time not allowing it to overreach itself.
He does say more about two other kinds of discourse. These are
religious discourse and political discourse. Ricoeur admits that he
hears something important and meaningful in the Christian gospel
even while he denies that he is doing anything like Christian philos-
ophy. In part, he draws this line separating his lived faith from phi-
losophy because Christian philosophy had a specific meaning in
France during his youth that he wishes to avoid. In part, this line of
separation reflects his concern to acknowledge and remain within
the bounds of the autonomy of philosophical thinking. As regards
the former point, Christian philosophy in France in the first half of
the twentieth century meant the neo-Thomism associated with the
names of such leading Roman Catholic philosophers as Jacques
85
Maritain and Etienne Gilson. Ricoeur himself, however, was raised
a Protestant and he remained within that tradition in his personal
life. Thus we must be careful in reading his comments on religion to
respect the line he means to draw, even if we decide in the end that
he has not been able to maintain as strict a line of separation as he
says he intends to do. There are, for example, a few texts, sermons
for the most part, where he does speak more directly out of his faith
to an audience that shares it but also to anyone who will listen or
who knows how to read.
3
Elsewhere, though, he should be read as a
philosopher speaking as a philosopher about religious discourse as
part of the fullness of language considered from a philosophical
point of view. Furthermore, his own comments on this use of reli-
gious language draw on the presupposition that it is possible to
distinguish 'originary' uses of such language from subsequent reflec-
tion on it such as we find in dogmatic pronouncements or systematic
theologies. It is such originary uses of religious discourse that
Ricoeur the philosopher seeks to consider insofar as they can be dis-
covered in the text that is the Bible.
What Ricoeur has to say about religious discourse, therefore,
should be read as a hermeneutic exercise applied to a particular text
or collection of texts, the Bible, because this text along with the
Greek philosophical tradition forms the basic source of the tradi-
tions and culture that have formed him. When asked whether what
he says about these texts might be applied more broadly to work in
the history of religions, he confesses that he does not know enough
about other world religions really to speak about them in this way.
He leaves it up to others to consider whether his philosophy of reli-
gious language can be appropriated for theological reflection or
work in religious studies.
Ricoeur's comments on the biblical text can be grouped under
three headings. Under the first one, he takes up the parables and
eschatological sayings of Jesus in light of his work on metaphor and
narrative. Jesus' parables are narratives, but narratives marked by a
certain 'extravagance' in that in speaking of the kingdom of God
they mix the extraordinary with the ordinary.4 They have a
metaphorical, redescriptive aspect in that they are more than similes.
It was the later tradition that read them that way and sometimes
embedded them in the gospels along with interpretations that
reduced them to directly descriptive or allegorical language. What is
more, the element of the extraordinary in the ordinary in these texts,
86
which biblical scholars see as capturing something of the historical
Jesus' actual preaching, can be read to reflect what Ricoeur calls a
logic of superabundance, a proclamation of a 'how much more' still
to come as found in Paul's letters. This logic of superabundance
stands over against every logic of equivalence; ones, for example,
where any reward is minutely equated with actual deeds and offers
nothing beyond this. Such a logic of superabundance suggests the
possibility of considering 'hope' as a philosophical term that con-
verges on but never quite equals what Christianity calls faith.
Ricoeur also takes up the question of originary religious dis-
course in relation to the Old Testament. He sees that it includes
many different forms of discourse, including narratives, legislation,
hymns, prophecy, and wisdom literature, and even sometimes blends
them together as in the narrative of the giving of the law at Sinai.
His striking claim here is that each of these forms of discourse
can be read as 'naming' God, but in each case in a different way.
Narratives, for example, speak of God as an actor in history if>r
above history; hymns like the psalms and lamentations address God
in the second person as a familiar other; and prophecy speaks in the
name of another other, one who speaks through the prophet's voice.
Furthermore, when placed together in a single book, the Bible, these
different ways of naming God can be said to interact. In this sense,
the Bible as a whole can be read as a polyphony of ways of naming
God, although Ricoeur stops short as a philosopher of saying just
what this name finally is. That belongs to faith, not to philosophy. It
seems clear, though, that Ricoeur's philosophy of religious discourse
as a kind of poetic discourse that names God leaves room for a rea-
sonable pluralism of ways to think and speak of God within what
we gather under the single heading, Christianity, as well as in rela-
tion to it and to other religious traditions. As Ricoeur himself points
out, turning to the New Testament, there are four different gospels
to be found there.
Finally, with regard to religious discourse, we should note some
late essays by Ricoeur written for the collection he published with an
Old Testament exegete, Andre LaCocque, under the title Thinking
Biblically. There his emphasis shifts from a focus on the texts for
themselves to how such religious discourse gets taken up and reused
in different settings. This is a shift that reflects the influence of
Ricoeur's narrative theory and the question of appropriation of nar-
rative through reading. As he points out as regards the Song of
87
Songs, for example, this book of what looks originally to have been
a collection of erotic poetry that somehow was included in the bib-
lical canon has been read again and again by individual believers and
mystics as speaking of the relation of the soul to God as well as
being used in communal worship to speak of the relation of the
community to God and of God to the community of faith. In terms
of his hermeneutic theory Ricoeur's essays in this volume show how
such a theory must also be able to incorporate what literary critics
and historians call a theory of reception. Such a theory fits well with
the question of narrative identity that Ricoeur discovers at the end
of Time and Narrative in that religious communities - for Ricoeur,
at least Christianity and Judaism; one could add Islam - define their
identity in relation to the foundational texts they privilege, texts that
they read and reread because these texts tell them who they are by
instructing them to read these very texts, another version of a
hermeneutical circle.
A similar point might be made about foundational political doc-
uments like the Magna Carta or the American Declaration of
Independence or national constitutions in the way political societies
use and reuse them. They are read as founding the community that
reads them as having just this foundational function. Ricoeur stops
well short, however, of simply equating political and religious dis-
course. This is because political discourse for him is always inter-
nally open to contestation in ways that originary religious discourse
is not. This is why, in an important lecture, he speaks of the 'fragility'
of political language (Ricoeur 1987). Political language is fragile
first of all because it is more a species of the rhetorical use of lan-
guage than of poetic language. As such, it aims at persuasion, even
in those cases where it may say that it claims certainty, persuasion
intended to link politics to the plane of human action in general. To
succeed it needs a public space of appearance which itself is not
always assured. Furthermore, there need to be rules that govern dis-
cussion in this arena, rules that themselves are always open to chal-
lenge, if not to misuse. Political discourse also brings into play the
question of authority, at least in the sense of a distinction between
those able to command and those required to obey, always leaving
open the difficult question what is it that legitimates this authority.
Ricoeur's class lectures on ideology and utopia are directly relevant
here.
5
Ideology has a positive function beyond its negative connota-
tions in that it serves to fill the gap between any claimed authority
88
THE FULl.NESS OF LANGUAGE AND FIGURATIVE DISCOURSE
or legitimacy and its actual basis in any given society. The idea of
utopia is linked to it dialectically in that utopian visions and texts
come from a use of the imagination that pictures a better society
when ideology goes beyond this legitimating function and makes
claims to power for which it has no basis.
But political discourse as a form of rhetorical argumentation is
always fragile for other reasons as well, even when all these condi-
tions are met. There is an insurmountable plurality to politics that
differs from the possible accepted plurality of interpretations that
may characterize religious traditions. In the first place, there are
always arguments about good government at the level of particular
policies or laws and how to implement them. There are also argu-
ments possible about the very idea of what constitutes good
government - a large or small state, centralized or decentralized
authority, an emphasis on social conformity or individual freedoms.
Beyond all this, there can even be arguments about the very idea,of
government itself, arguments, according to Ricoeur, that usulf1ly
come down to qifferences over the idea of what finally constitutes a
good life. Hence, for political discourse conflict is inevitable and
cannot be removed once and for all because the possible conceptions
of government themselves are many and finally not reconcilable
under one overarching concept. And, in the end, all political dis-
course is a use of language always open to sophistic misuse, a point
that makes plausible Ricoeur's subsequent concern for the idea of
'the just' as a way of extending his own ethical position beyond indi-
viduals and small intimate groups to the level of society itself. Before
considering that, however, he first turns to the question of narrative
identity he had discovered in his work on narrative. In particular, he
takes it up in relation to the idea of selfhood as a way of getting
beyond the aporias of subjectivity in the subject-object model.
89
CHAPTERS
SELFHOOD AND PERSONAL IDENTITY
Oneself as Another is, as its title indicates, a book about selfuood. In
this sense, it stands in continuity with the question of personal iden-
tity and narrative identity introduced in the conclusion to Time and
Narrative. That is, the question of personal or narrative identity
leads to the question of what it means to be a self, although this
question does not exhaust all the possibilities of narrative identity,
which can also apply to plural-subjects such as religious and politi-
cal communities. Ricoeur now sees, however, that such identities
have to be understood in relation to selfuood. The main thesis of this
new work, based on the Gifford Lectures he had given in 1986 at the
University of Edinburgh, is that selfuood is a complex phenomenon
that involves two kinds of identity, which do not reduce to a single
idea of sameness. Indeed, what Ricoeur now calls ipse identity
'implies no assertion concerning some unchanging core of person-
ality' (OAA, 2). This is why it can relate to a narrative identity
that unfolds or changes over time. But this book is also important
because in it Ricoeur begins to layout what he calls his 'little ethics'
in relation to what he has to say about seIfuood. He does so because
the self in question is an agent capable of action and responsible for
its actions, hence the ethical question has to arise.
To make his case regarding both selfhood and ethics, Ricoeur once
again takes up the question of philosophies of the subject stemming
from the Cartesian model. He argues that the philosophical quarrel
over the cogito today has been superseded by the question of self-
hood he is considering. His critique of such philosophies is twofold.
In the first place, all such philosophies are formulated in terms of the
first person, but as we shall see, the self can be spoken of in terms of
all three grammatical persons and cannot be understood apart from
90
taking all of them into consideration. Secondly, discussions of the
philosophy of the subject over time have fallen into two opposed
positions: either they present an apology for the cogito as presenting
a first truth that philosophy can build on, or they see it as an illusion
possibilities that Ricoeur suggests were both already present in
Descartes' own presentation of the cogito in his Meditations on First
Philosophy. Nietzsche represents an exemplary instance of those who
see the cogito as needing to be overthrown, leading to a position
Ricoeur calls the 'shattered cogito', where the very question that gave
rise to the cogito argument, that of possible certainty in the face of
scepticism, has itself to be denied in favour of seeing everything as an
interpretation, if not as a fiction. As Ricoeur quickly notes, a major
problem for such an argument is whether it does not succumb to its
own blows.
His own approach will be to develop what he now calls a
hermeneutics of the self. This approach is not meant to exhaust
every question that might be raised about selfhood, say regardiniits
physiological basis as studied by the natural sciences. His hermeneu-
tics of the self is rather to be based on a kind of philosophical dis-
course, one that Ricoeur seeks to establish through a three-step
argument. This argument will begin with a reflection on what ana-
lytic philosophy has to offer to this topic; next it will take up the
dialectic of selfhood and sameness implied by this first step; then
finally it will turn to the dialectic of selfhood and otherness insofar
as this provides further insight into the constituting of the self as a
capable human being, someone who has an identity, but also
someone who can act in the world with and for others. It is the ques-
tion 'who?' that ties these stages together.
Briefly, we can say that they unfold as follows. The first step is to
see that the question 'who?' involves something other than a thing in
general, a person. This is someone who can designate him- or herself
in speaking and acting. It is someone who has a personal identity
and who stands and acts in relation to others, leading to considera-
tion of the ethical and moral determinations of such action in rela-
tion to this 'who' which answers the question 'who did this?' In the
end, the question of ontology arises again. It involves the questions
of what it means to be an agent and to be historical, but also that of
the unity of this historical agent. Ricoeur is somewhat hesitant here;
as usual, he proceeds very cautiously in taking up ontology. What he
will suggest, however, is that through a kind of overstatement we can
91
speak of a kind of analogical unity to convey the reality of the agen-
tial self. This use of language will not refer to some substance, but
rather draw upon the metaphysics of potentiality and actuality,
although Ricoeur does not pursue what this might mean in any
detail. Instead, he will conclude by returning to the question of the
possibility of certainty that lay behind Descartes' original argument.
His suggestion will be that what we see at the end of these reflections
on selfhood is that another sense of certainty is entailed here, one
that he will call attestation. This, he will say, is a form of non-doxic
belief; that is, it is not a weak form of scientific knowledge. Rather it
links up with the notion of testimony in the sense that selves attest
to their identity and their responsibility through their testimony
about themselves. Obviously, this kind of certainty is always fragile
in some ways, not in the sense that attestation can be shown to be
false, but because it is always threatened by suspicion. We can say to
others and even to ourselves, 'I don't believe you or I don't trust you.'
But this is the price to pay for a discourse aware of its own lack of
foundation and, implicitly, the price to pay for being a self.
Ricoeur begins by drawing on analytic philosophy and its dis-
cussion of identifying reference, which he understands as stem-
ming from a semantic approach to the use of ordinary language.
Identifying reference is one such use of language. It designates indi-
viduals rather than classifying them in terms of a concept or predi-
cating a property to them, although it also presupposes both these
other uses of language. Analytic philosophers have identified three
such procedures: definite descriptions, proper names, and various
kinds of indicators that pick out individual things. A definite
description is a phrase like 'the first man to land on the moon' Such
a way of referring to an individual already depends on a minimal
sense of otherness in that it isolates this individual as a member of
some class or set. Proper names are different in that they assign a
permanent designation to an individual, one that is open to all kinds
of predication, including negative cases as well as positive ones. Here
we find otherness as designating a single individual in opposition to
all the other members of a class or set. Finally, ordinary language
includes such indicators as the personal pronouns, deictic terms
('this', 'that'), adverbs of time and place, and the verb tenses that
can be used in each case to designate a specific thing. What it is
important to note is that the reference here is relative to some act
of discourse taken as a fixed point and as a real event in the world.
92
Such indicators may vary from language to language, but in terms
of their function in cases of identifying reference, they all stand on
the same level. It is their common function of picking out an indi-
vidual that provides the only unity among these different kinds of
semantic procedures.
Ricoeur's next move is to focus on the notion of an individual in
order to move from the general idea of an individual to the individ-
ual that each of us is. Here he draws on Peter Strawson's Individuals
with its idea of the 'basic particulars' that function in cases of iden-
tifying reference. The key distinction here is between physical bodies
and 'persons', where the idea of a person does not yet include the
ability of this person to designate him- or herself by speaking. A
person is still only one of the things in the world that can be identi-
fied and referred to by language in general. But this already suggests
that when self-identification occurs, it takes place in situations of
interlocution where persons speak to one another, and also that it
will draw on the use of demonstratives such as the personal
nouns and possessive adjectives to express itself. But what matters
here are the kinds of predicates that can be applied to such basic par-
ticulars. A person is a thing, but not only a thing like things in
general. Persons have bodies, but 'the concept of person is no less a
primitive concept than that of the body' (OAA, 33). The point is that
both physical and mental predicates apply in the case of persons, so
the question of embodiment, which was already present in Ricoeur's
early work, comes back in force. What he sees now is that there are
two major questions here: how a person is a body about which we
speak and how a person can be a subject who designates him- or
herself in the first person while addressing a second person or other
persons. There is also the further difficulty of understanding how a
third person can be someone who can designate him- or herself in
the first person.
Following Strawson, Ricoeur says that this notion of a person can
be made more specific in terms of the kinds of predicates we ascribe
to it. At a first level, ascription is simply one form of attribution, but
one that does not yet recognize the ability of persons to designate
themselves by attributing predicates to themselves. Next, there is a
sense in which the person in question is always the 'same' thing to
which physical and mental predicates are applied. But this already
poses the question what we may mean by 'sameness' here. Certainly,
in predicating mental or physical predicates to persons, we mean
93
these predicates to retain the same sense in each case, but this seems
to be because the person in question is still anonymous at this stage.
It is no one in particular, especially not in the sense of someone who
can also say me and ascribe these predicates to him- or herself.
Ricoeur holds that an appeal to the ideas of oneself as a person and
another as also a person does not resolve what is at issue here because
ascribing consciousness to oneself is something felt, whereas ascrib-
ing it to others is something observed. So two problems are posed:
how to 'include in the notion of something self-ascribable the self-
designation of a subject' (OAA, 38) and, at the same time, how to
preserve the otherness of the other at the same time that we ascribe
this same power of self-designation to him or her (or them). A
related question is whether we can unite these two questions through
an understanding of them as standing in reciprocity with each other.
To do so will require more attention to 'a reflexive theory of utter-
ance', one that does not fall into 'the aporias of solipsism and the
impasses of private experience' (OAA, 39).
This calls for a change in perspective from a semantic to a prag-
matic approach, one that shifts the focus from what is said to the
saying or utterance and thereby brings the 'I' and 'you' on stage in
cases of interlocution. 'The question will be finally to determine how
the "I-you" of interlocution can be externalized in a "him" or "her"
without losing its capacity to designate itself, and how the "he/she"
of identifying reference can be internalized in a speaking subject who
designates himself or herself as an I' (OAA, 41). The theory of
speech acts, as developed by IL. Austin and John Searle, has shown
that sometimes saying can be doing, as in cases like 'I promise (you)
that 1 will Here the speaker, in the first person singular, con-
fronts the hearer or hearers in the second person. The question is
what is the relationship of this speaker to his or her speech act? It
depends on what linguistic theory calls a shifter - that is, an indica-
tor (such as '1', or 'here' or 'there') that applies to different speakers
or different situations in different cases. Such shifters link the speaker
to the utterance, especially in that the 'I' functions as the central pole
around which the other shifters are organized. This 'I' is not some-
thing that can be replaced by a designation such as 'the person cur-
rently speaking' for there is a logical gap between the 'I' here and the
idea of an entity that can be identified by the semantics of reference.
Still, while the reflexivity involved here does not simply reduce to a
function of what is said, it is a reflexivity without selfhood in the
94
strong sense that Ricoeur is looking for. What is at issue, to put it
another way, is the question how this '1' is both concretely anchored
in the situation of interlocution, as speech-act theory indicates, and
yet not reducible to it in that this I does not completely belong to the
objects of which it speaks, if only because it can talk about them.
What kind of being this might be already anticipates that the onto-
logical question will have to arise at some point.
Ricoeur's next move is to shift his attention to the idea that speech
acts are kinds of action and to extend this insight to a more general
consideration of action in general, again by beginning from the
semantics of action. What is at stake here is a network of concepts,
which applies to both agents and their actions, and that 'shares the
same transcendental status as the conceptual framework of basic
particulars' (OAA, 58). Within this network, meaning stems from the
answers it can provide to questions such as: 'who?' 'what?' 'where?'
'how?' 'when?' and so forth, all of which are cross-signifying. Yet the
semantic theory of action tends to underplay the importance dt the
tie to the question 'who?' with its apparent link to something like a
self in favour of a focus on the questions 'what?' and 'why?' tending
thereby once again to suggest that the self should be thought of as a
causally determined thing or event, and as such something anony.-
mous, even while this theory of action recognizes that the 'who?'
question can be answered in a variety of different ways, including in
terms of the personal pronouns.
Ricoeur argues that the major problem is that too strong a
dichotomy is assumed in such an approach between motives as
reasons-for and as causes, so that once we have discovered an answer
to what an action is, we think we have also accounted for why it
occurs. Instead he proposes a phenomenological account that makes
room for more mixed forms of discourse regarding action, ones
where the notions of reason and cause overlap, even to the point of
coinciding in the idea of an efficient cause that calls for a teleological
explanation. This is a possibility that he thiriks has been overlooked
by the analytic approach. The dichotomous approach he criticizes
can be seen both in works like Anscombe's Intention, which Ricoeur
calls a kind of conceptual impressionism, and in Donald Davidson's
essays, which represent a more cubist approach. Ricoeur's real cri-
tique, however, is that it is the loss or suppression of any reference to
an agent that makes possible this dichotomy. He further notes that
both kinds of predicates - reasons and causes - can be applied to one
95
and the same thing, an agent. This is why actions are both a certain
physical configuration and 'an accomplishment capable of being
interpreted in terms of reasons for acting which explain it' (OAA,
66). It is also why bringing the question of the agent into considera-
tion adds the question of veracity to that of truth. There is not only
a question of whether something is a correct description of an action
in terms of what happens, but also one of whether we accept or not
the agent's claim to have done it. It is this idea of veracity that will
subsequently provide the link to that of attestation for Ricoeur.
Ricoeur holds that his phenomenological approach does allow for
an explanatory approach to action, but that there is always more in
the phenomenological description even than in any proposed teleo-
logical explanation. This something more is 'the conscious orienta-
tion of an agent capable of recognizing herself as the subject of her
acts' (OAA, 79). Thus the idea of an intention-to, an intention to do
something, is broader than what is conveyed by applying the adverb
'intentionally' to the description of actions as observable events in
the world and is not derivative from such descriptions. As evidence
of this, Ricoeur notes that analytic approaches tend not to attend to
the verb tenses we use to speak of action; in particular they ignore
the importance of reference to the future, not just as something yet
to come but in the sense expressed by the future perfect tense, as
when we refer to an act that will have been done but has not yet
occurred. This latter example shows that intending to do something
can involve anticipating a passage of time in which the act will
unfold, in contrast to any focus on the act as a point-like event. 1 This,
in turn, suggests that there may be a question about the very idea of
sameness operative in action theory. Perhaps this idea, which is that
of something always the same in the sense that it never changes, is
not the sameness that needs to be applied to the identity of a self
Another question will be whether this focus on a limited idea of
what constitutes an event hinders the understanding of action as
something that can be imputed to an agent-self If so, a different -
or at least an expanded - ontology is required, one that would 'intro-
duce the question of the mode of being of the agent on some other
basis than that of the analysis of the logical form of action sen-
tences, without in any way denying the validity of this approach'
(OAA, 86). Anticipating where he wants to take this, Ricoeur sug-
gests that this would be an ontology of a 'being in the making, pos-
sessing de jure the problematic of selfhood' (ibid.). And to begin to
96
move in that direction he proposes to take a closer look at the notion
of ascription of action to an agent and the epistemological role this
entails for attestation by drawing on the pragmatics rather than the
semantics of action.
What is important about the idea of ascription is that it applies to
persons as a kind of basic particular, whether this be oneself or
another. These persons are unique in the sense that they are the only
such basic particulars to which both mental and physical predicates
apply, so there is no need to presuppose a mind-body dualism as
we continue to examine the idea of selfhood; selves are embodied
minds. As Aristotle had already noted, action depends on the agent.
The question is how to make sense of this dependence. One basic
point here, again one already seen by Aristotle, is that we distinguish
between actions done freely by the agent and those done in spite of
himself, where both kinds of acts may include or depend on others
that are themselves the result of prior deliberation. This distinction
allows us to refine the notion of ascription in terms of the r e l ~ t e
idea of attribution: we ascribe acts to an agent that are voluntary or
involuntary but which in some sense depend on the agent as indi-
cated by the fact that such ascription-attribution allows us to answer
the question 'who?' without having to invoke a claim that the act was,
done voluntarily or even to invoke any ethical evaluation of what
was done.
2
Modern action theory goes beyond this sense of ascription as
attribution in that it emphasizes the uniqueness of every act as a par-
ticular occurrence. This opens the door to a greater emphasis on the
idea of a capacity to act and a capacity to designate oneself as the
agent to whom acts are ascribed. And this capacity links up nicely
to the theory of speech acts insofar as this theory brings into play
the personal pronouns, including the impersonal 'one', in relation to
the question 'who?' In the case of the first-person use, ascription
points to the reappropriation by the agent of his or her own acts and,
beyond this, to deliberation. One point worth noting here is that
naming the author of an act cuts off the investigation into the ques-
tion 'who?' whereas searching for the motives of any act is an open-
ended process, even though these two questions are capable of being
related. They are not mutually exclusive.
Yet there is more at issue in this investigation of ascription than
can be accounted for by speech-act theory in that 'designating one-
self as agent means something more than designating oneself as the
97
speaker' (OAA, 96) of what is said. For one thing, the ascription here
is not just to a thing in general; it is to oneself or to another self inas-
much as the answer to the question 'who?' refers to something other
than just some 'what' This is indicated by the role mental predicates
like thinking, willing, feeling, can play here.
3
Furthermore, ascription
to a 'who' can run a gamut that runs from a completely anony-
mous 'one' (someone did this) to a sense of 'someone' in the sense of
anyone (someone will have to clean up), to, finally, a particular
someone, which suggests that we need to get beyond the perspective
of identifying reference if we are to make sense of how an agent can
designate him- or herself in such a way that there is a genuine other
to whom the same attribution can be made.
The related idea of prescribing is helpful here in that it helps us to
move beyond the purely logical idea of ascription by suggesting both
that actions are rule-governed and that agents can be held responsi-
ble for what they do. Ricoeur therefore suggests that we use the term
imputation to refer to those cases where we ascribe an action to an
agent who is held responsible for his or her acts and where these
actions are themselves considered to be permissible or not.
4
These
acts - for example, those taken up by criminal courts - tend to be
more complex than those taken as examples when considering the
grammar and logic of action sentences. They also introduce the
related idea of a verdict when we consider them as permissible or
not, as praiseworthy or blameworthy. But, more importantly, they
emphasize in a sense a still-to-be-determined causal tie between the
agent and his or her act in that we presuppose that such acts are
within an agent's power. The idea of an efficient causality returns to
the fore here, but it does so, Ricoeur emphasizes, as the result of a
labour of thinking, not simply as an assumption.
Now, is this a causality that we can attribute to an agent? Ricoeur
thinks the answer is yes, if we see that what this implies is a power to
act in the world, but not to create that world, so there will be some
limits on an agent's responsibility. What these limits may be is not a
factual question, however, because discovering them will also
require taking into account the idea of a decision being made, a
point that will have large consequences when Ricoeur takes up the
question of justice on the basis of the little ethics he begins to layout
at the end of Oneself as Another In terms of the question of self-
hood, however, the more immediate problem is how to make sense
of the central idea that agents do intervene in the course of the
world, and, moreover, sometimes they do it on the basis of thought.
Ascription by itself is not capable of explaining this. A fuller
account will also require taking seriously the attestation by means of
which agents take responsibility for their actions.
The transition to this new question begins by noting that what the
philosophy of action tends to overlook is the temporal dimension
both of the self and of action. The person about whom we speak
and the agent on whom action depends both have a history. This is
significant, says Ricoeur, because it relates to the question of per-
sonal identity, a question that can be considered only by taking into
account the temporal dimension of human existence. One way to do
this is to return to the idea of narrative identity, not so much in terms
of how it relates to history and fiction as at the end of Time and
Narrative but in terms of the very idea of identity. On this basis,
we can see how such narrative identity can playa mediating role
between a more descriptive point of view regarding action and the
prescriptive one that Ricoeur intends to develop on the basis df a
claim that the practical field that can enter into narrative is broader
than what can be articulated through an analysis of the semantics
and pragmatics of action sentences. To see this we need only to rec-
ognize that a narrative can apply to an entire lifetime, not to sayan
even longer historical span, and this is something that we have to
take into account if we are to speak about ethics.
It is now that Ricoeur begins to take up the details of his major
distinction between selfhood as ipse-identity and sameness as what
he calls idem-identity. He does so in relation to the question of how
these apply to the idea of permanence over time by first noting that
'sameness' can take different senses. It can mean numerical identity
in the cases where we identify two different occurrences as being of
one and the same thing. Or it can be used to speak of qualitative
sameness in the sense of the close resemblance of two different
things. Or it can be linked to the idea of continuity over time.
Ricoeur's question is whether we must necessarily link this continu-
ity in every case to something like an underlying substrate or sub-
stance that does not change, yet can still preserve the idea of a
permanence over time that may apply to selfhood. Two examples are
important here. The first is the idea of character, something that has
both descriptive and emblematic value.
5
Character, we can say, refers
to the 'set of distinctive marks which permit the reidentification of
a human individual as being the same' (OAA, 119), for example,
99
through habits or recognizable dispositions to act in certain ways or
say certain things or cling to certain values. Character in this sense
might be called the 'what' of the 'who' It assures numerical and
qualitative identity and makes possible the permanence in time that
defines a certain kind of sameness. The second example is that of
keeping one's word, which stands over against the sense of identity
tied to character. 'Keeping one's word expresses a self-constancy
which cannot be inscribed, as character was, within the dimension
of something in general but solely within the dimension of "who?'"
(OAA, 123). This kind of self-constancy can be seen to be at work
both with reference to friendship and to the idea of a promise made
and kept, but what Ricoeur wants especially to emphasize is the
idea that narrative identity is something that unfolds between these
two poles.
To see this, we have first to consider those theories of personal
identity that ignore the distinction between idem-identity and ipse-
identity; in particular, the theories of Locke and Hume, and the dead
ends and paradoxes they run into. Locke, for example, held that
identity was the result of a comparison that showed something to be
identical with itself, hence as coinciding with itself in either an
instant or over time. But to get the possibility of sameness enduring
over time he then had to link this comparison toruemory, opening
the door to questions not only about what might happen if memory
were lost but also regarding what criteria make possible this com-
parison, leading eventually to the thought experiment of puzzling
cases where identity would not be decidable. Hume, on the contrary,
kept a strong concept of sameness but was willing to entertain the
idea of degrees in assigning identity, leaving open the question how
and when we do assign it and whether this is merely a belief on our
part. But as Ricoeur notes, the self returns as soon as we ask who
does this, who makes the comparison or holds the belief? This same
question governs his discussion of Derek Parfit who develops the
puzzling cases made possible by Locke and who holds that 'personal
identity is not what matters' 6 Again, Ricoeur counters, who asks
whether this is so - and has the question of mineness simply been
ruled out of court by fiat? His own position is that the idea of nar-
rative identity needs to be considered here as a better alternative to
these theories.
The central point in his case for narrative identity will be that the
relation between selfhood and sameness needs to be understood
100
dialectically; that is, we need to see that each term depends on the
other for its meaning and that narrative identity lies somewhere
between them. What narrative adds here is the ability to explore this
middle range, up to and including those puzzling cases considered
by Parfit. Furthermore, the practical field revealed in this way is one
that links action theory and moral theory because narrative is never
morally neutral. In this sense, narrative can provide the first labora-
tory for moral judgement. Narrative can do this because it is consti-
tuted through a plot that, as Time and Narrative had already shown,
configures the episodic and the told story into a tensive temporal
whole, one that makes sense of the idea of a permanence over time
as a dynamic identity like the one that applies to the characters in
the story. They may change as a result of the turning points in the
plot, but they also remain identifiable as being the same characters.?
In fact, we can go further and say that characters are themselves
plots. They too are constituted by an internal dialectic 'which is the
exact corollary of the dialectic of concordance and discordHnce
developed by the emplotment of action' in the sense that the char-
acter draws his or her singular identity 'from the unity of a life con-
sidered a temporal totality which is itself singular and distinguished
from all others' (OAA, 147). This, again, is a dialectic of selfhood.
and sameness over time that narrative can explore up to the point
where in an example such as Robert Musil's The Man Without
Qualities identity is finally lost because the dialectic breaks down
(and the novel was never completed). The dialectic breaks down
because it reaches a point where selfhood no longer is supported by
sameness and we are returned to Parfit's puzzling cases where the self
is merely the brain or something in the brain that can be moved - or
at least imagined as being moved about -like any other object in the
world. But this only confirms that such examples are drawn from
imaginative variations focused on idem-sameness, not on selfhood
in the sense of ipse-identity. For Ricoeur, this kind of reduction is
based on a denial of the ontological condition of persons as embod-
ied, worldly acting and suffering beings in that it simply removes any
possibility of ipse-identity and selfhood on the assumption that the
category of event does include objectively observable events but not
narrative ones.
But Ricoeur is not yet ready to propose an alternative ontology
because he sees that he needs first to explore further the practical
field revealed through narrative in order to show how it can be said
101
to connect description and prescription. The key goal here is to dis-
cover a tie between ascription and imputation where ascription
assigns an act to an agent and imputation applies in those cases
where the agent has some obligation to act. As already stated, nar-
rative extends the practical field because of the complex forms
of action it can relate. These complex forms can themselves be
arranged in hierarchies of 'units of praxis' where each unit has its
principle of organization and integrates a variety of logical connec-
tions and where these units in turn can be combined in many
different ways up to the level of overall life plans. Two factors now
bring the ethical dimension into view. One is that there is also a ques-
tion of self-constancy on these higher, long-term levels. Does a char-
acter at these higher levels not have to remain the same self over
time? Does he or she not have some felt or even logical obligation to
do so, indicated perhaps by the example of keeping one's promises
as a way of keeping one's word? Second, that a character's actions
can take on intersubjective forms brings into play situations both
where the self can efface itself in the face of other and the fact that
suffering, one's own or that or "another, can be the consequence of
such acts. This gives still more impetus to the question of responsi-
bility already implicit in the question of self-constancy. It also opens
the way to consideration of philosophers like Jean Nabert, Gabriel
Marcel and Emmanuel Levinas, who in different ways all hold that
there is an ethical primacy of the other over the self.
8
This lays the groundwork for adding the question 'who is the
subject of moral imputation?' to those of who is acting, speaking or
narrating, at the same time that it undercuts the idea of a sharp
break between description and prescription. It does so, Ricoeur
argues, because reflection on the analysis of action shows that 'it is
part of the very idea of action that it be accessible to precepts' (OAA,
169, original italics), where moral rules can be shown to be inscribed
within this broader concept of precepts. This insight, in turn, leads
Ricoeur to begin to spell out his own 'little ethics' as a way of pro-
viding an overall structure to these moral rules. This is a theory that
without any particular concern for orthodoxy regarding interpreta-
tions of Aristotle's and Kant's moral theories will seek to combine
the two traditions.
9
It will do so by formulating its theory in terms
of three stages running from a teleological to a deontological to a
practical level. In this theory, 'ethics' will apply to the first stage as
characterizing the aim of a good life and 'morality' will be used to
102
describe how this aim gets articulated in terms of norms that func-
tion both as universal rules and a kind of constraint on action. The
final stage will fall under the heading of phronesis, or what Aristotle
called practical wisdom. It has to do with the application of both the
ethical intention and its norms in concrete situations. 10 The question
of selfhood runs across these three stages in terms of the ideas of
self-esteem and self-respect, but self-respect will always be more
fundamental than self-esteem.
The first ethical, and teleological, stage can be summed up by the
ethical intention expressed in the maxim: aiming at the good life with
and for others, in just institutions. Self-esteem draws on this notion
of a good life but really is empty apart from the interaction with
others and incomplete apart from the broader domain of just insti-
tutions. In this sense, ethics for Ricoeur depends on unfolding the
whole structure of this ethical intention through someone's putting
it into practice through concrete acts, where as we have seen such
fragmented acts come together in the idea of a whole life that tan be
recounted. Here it is the idea of a narrative unity that will draw
together and hold together the subject of ethics by assigning him or
her a narrative identity, and self-esteem will first appear as the result
of one's self-interpretation of this narrative identity. This n r r t ~ v e
identity will be always open to reinterpretation if the narrative
changes and not subject to verification like truth claims based on
scientific observation.
At the next level of the ethical intention, the ideal relation to
others can be summed up as solicitude for the other, which intro-
duces the question both of whether the self is worthy of such self-
esteem and whether such self-esteem does not require the mediation
of the other to realize itself. Ricoeur wants to link both these ques-
tions to the self's capacity to act and, in this work, he uses the
example of friendship to illustrate its best case. However, he also
notes in passing that there may be a deeper issue here in that we can
distinguish between reciprocal and mutual recognition, a topic he
will return to in his Course of Recognition. But here, in the best case,
he holds that friendship already borders on justice without itself
turning into justice, something he sees as appearing only at the level
of institutions, thereby giving continuity to the discontinuity in his
preferred ethical intention. Friendship borders on justice because it
is based on giving and receiving, but also because it goes beyond
such exchanges to raise the possibility of benevolent spontaneity
103
and even the possibility of sharing others' suffering. In this way, a
new element of self-reflection can be introduced into the aim of a
good life with others, and we can say that self-esteem is again the
possible product of this reflexive moment. At the same time, the rela-
tion to others that gives rise to this reflexive possibility shows that to
say 'self' is not the same thing as saying 'myself' And this leads to
the further insight that I cannot esteem myself unless I can also
esteem others as themselves selves, themselves myselves, other selves.
Institutions come into play when we are no longer dealing with a
face-to-face relation to the other. A new determination of the self
then comes into play, one where we must speak of 'each' self. And
with it comes a new requirement, that of equality at least in regard
to historical communities of people who choose to live and act
together.
ll
Institutions also introduce the idea of the self, oneself
or another, as a potential third party, someone who can serve as
a neutral arbiter in disputes that may arise at the level not only of
face-to-face encounters, but within institutions themselves, a topic
Ricoeur will pursue in his essays on the just. At the limit, the door is
open to the question of whether such just institutions can extend to
encompass all of humanity.
This ethical aim needs, however, to be subject to the test of the
norm, of obligation. This is where self-respect comes into play. If we
again consider the idea of a good life with and for others, in just
institutions, the first thing to say is that the very idea of a good life
recalls that the self is not simply the 'I' in the sense of an isolated
ego. There is already an element of universality operative in the very
idea of a good life and the way we find it valuable. Moreover, this
idea of universality already introduces the correlative ideas of duty
and constraint as applicable to achieving such a life. These, in turn,
suggest how sometimes this aim can miscarry and be used for evil,
not good ends, which is why a test of moral obligation arises. With
regard to oneself this is already a question of self-respect. With
regard to others, this idea of self-respect gets expanded to include
the question of respect for others through an application of the
Golden Rule, which introduces another sense of reciprocity, one that
mediates between the idea of the other as in some abstract sense a
person yet also a concrete individual. Both the Golden Rule and the
respect owed to the other person in turn help establish reciprocity
where there is a lack of reciprocity, in a way that confirms both the
autonomy of each person and the possibility of solicitude between
104
them. Finally comes the level of institutions and with it the question
of principles of justice and respect for every other that can apply
beyond the face-to-face relation of solicitude. Because of its rooted-
ness in the ethical idea of a good life, Ricoeur argues that at this level
the idea of a just solution must go beyond what can be captured by
purely procedural formulations of justice as well as beyond strictly
utilitarian solutions. Furthermore, there is a place for autonomy at
each level that needs to be acknowledged, even if it is true that such
personal autonomy is something that can only be attested to, not
founded on something outside itself.
Finally comes the stage of applying the ethical intention and the
normative obligation it entails to concrete situations. 'This passage
from general maxims of action to moral judgment in situation',
Ricoeur says, 'requires, in our opinion, simply the reawakening of
the resources of singularity inherent in the aim of the true life'
(OAA, 240), which again will ultimately have to appeal to a convic-
tion that one can testify to but not prove in some other, final ~ a y
That this level may involve conflict requires, Ricoeur adds, a sense of
the tragic dimension of action. This may cause us to doubt ourselves
or to become disillusioned, or it may, as Greek tragedy suggests, lead
to knowledge and catharsis that enable us to go on, albeit not on the.
basis of a direct and univocal teaching, but rather on the basis of
moral judgements made in specific situations. It is, furthermore, one
more aspect of what is involved in our attaining self-recognition.
The question still remains, however: if conflicts are inevitable, why is
this so? And what solution is Ricoeur's little ethics with its commit-
ment to practical wisdom capable of bringing to them? An answer
to the first question is that beyond rules of procedure lies a diverse
range of ideas regarding any good to be distributed and even of ways
to do this. There is no one institutional solution to this diversity. This
is why politics is always a struggle in some ways - for instance, in
order to prevent someone or some party from snatching a monop-
oly of power. But there can also be conflicts on how to order the
goods a group may in fact agree upon as being desirable. Finally,
there is always the question how we legitimate the institutions
assigned to deal with these questions, to the point of asking whether
they should even exist.
As for the second question, that about how to resolve conflicts,
Ricoeur holds that the Kantian test of universalization is not
sufficient, if only because, unlike Kant, he finds that these rules, even
105
when presumed to be universal, can collide when it comes to actual
cases and with the demands of otherness already inherent in solici-
tude. Kant, he believes, already ran into this problem in trying to rec-
oncile respect for rules and respect of persons in his threefold
formulation of the categorical imperative. This is why 'practical
wisdom consists in inventing conduct that will best satisfy the excep-
tion required by solicitude by betraying the rule to the smallest
extent possible' (OAA, 269). In the most difficult cases, say those
applying to the beginning and ending of life, this comes down to
drawing a line between what is permissible and what is not, a solu-
tion that rarely results in a clear dichotomy. This is why, Ricoeur
concludes, it is necessary to 'completely revise Kantian formalism'
(OAA, 274), first by calling into question the emphasis it places on
autonomy over respect for the other person, then by broadening the
test of universalization to look like something more like legal rea-
soning (which itself is an instance of a judgement made in a par-
ticular case), where the intended outcome will be not so much
to preserve coherence as to construct it. Finally, such a revision
requires something close to what has been called an ethics of com-
munication, one that will build on a dialogical rather than a mono-
logical understanding of practical reason. From this will follow a
revised notion of what counts as a moral argument. H will be a form
of argument that will include a place for an appeal to convictions,
that is, to what is expressed through attestation. The result will be a
moral philosophy that is itself characterized by the kind of fragility
that constitutes selfhood.
If we accept this, we can then say that imputability 'is the ascrip-
tion of action to its agent, under the condition of ethical and moral
predicates, which characterize the action as good, just, conforming
to duty, done out of duty, and finally, as being the wisest in the case
of conflictual situations' (OAA, 292, original italics). To whom,
then, is such action imputable? To the self, where the self is capable
of passing through the whole course of ethical and moral determi-
nations of action, so that at the end self-esteem becomes the expres-
sion of a basic conviction, but one always checked by self-respect.
This will be a conviction that makes possible the responsible self
one who ought to be recognized as such.
Ricoeur can finally take up the ontological question what kind of
self this is, in the sense of what mode of being belongs to it. His
answer comes from the way he characterizes everything that has
106
gone before as amounting to a hermeneutics of selfhood. This
hermeneutics is one based on reflection that begins from analysis to
consider the contrast between selfhood and sameness, then turns to
the dialectical relation to the other, culminating in self-understand-
ing that is obviously a form of self-interpretation. More import-
antly, this hermeneutic of selfhood leads to more than one answer,
even on the ontological level. In the first place, what we can say is
that the self is something that attests to itself as existing in the sense
of ipseity, of a dynamic continuity over time. This attestation makes
a truth claim that is based on the mediation of reflection by linguis-
tic analysis, but also goes beyond simply being a claim about
language usage. It presupposes that this use of language is about
something beyond itself; in this case, the self in its very being.
The contrary of this truth claim is not falsity, but suspicion.
Indeed, suspicion is not simply the contrary of this truth claim, it is
also the path to such attestation insofar as the self questions itself
about its being and can be questioned by others. From an episteJo-
logical point of view, the resulting attestation will be characterized by
belief as a kind of credence or trust in what is said. Ontologically, such
attestation will turn on the idea of an underlying unity to human
action, one that can be more or less adequately expressed by the dis-
tinction between a power to act and actual action, where this unity is
better thought of as analogical than as simply univocal. It is what
makes possible the self's lived experience of being able to say 'I can',
because it relates this experience to what the self in fact can ascribe to
its own initiative and impute to its own responsibility. In this sense,
the self is not simply something attested to; it is also a power-to-act
in the world. Heidegger's analysis of Dasein as being in the world is
helpful here, but Ricoeur worries that it may not be able to avoid a
metaphysics of presence in trying to account for the fundamental
nexus between being oneself and being-in-the-world. Instead, he
expresses a preference for Spinoza's suggestion that this connection
should be thought of in terms of conatus as an effort to persevere in
being, one that has priority over any focus on consciousness.
What the dialectic with otherness contributes here is first of all
acknowledgement of the polysemy of otherness. Otherness does not
only refer to the otherness of another person, it also includes the
otherness at the heart of selfhood found in the tension between its
idem-identity and ipse-identity. Attestation bears witness to this
tension when it acknowledges the self's passivity, something that
107
prevents our identifying the self with some absolute foundation as
in many misreadings of the cogito. This passivity is experienced in
many ways, including the experience of our own body as something
we do not fully control, and similarly in our relation to the other
person, but most deeply in our experience of ourselves in relation to
conscience - which is not yet Cartesian consciousness and is one of
the sources of what above was spoken of as suspicion. Philosophy
cannot fully account for the source of this experienced otherness.
This is one reason Ricoeur must be content with a hermeneutics of
selfhood, but like his approach to ontology in general, it is a
hermeneutics that finds that selfhood can be said in many ways - just
like being.
108
CHAPTER 6
MEMORY, RECOGNITION, PRACTICAL WISDOM
Ricoeur's last published major works take up themes and topics
anticipated in the works we considered in the preceding chapters.
In these new books, he both continues to develop these earlier
topics and introduces new concerns. These new ideas come .from
questions discovered through this earlier work or in r s p o ~ to
challenges coming from work done by others, including both
philosophers and historians. The large book he published in
2000 on memory, history and forgetting (MHF) provides a clear
example. It picks up the discussion from Time and Narrative about
history as a form of narrative discourse along with its conditions
of possibility. In fact, the questions in this new book are traceable
all the way back to Ricoeur's early reflections on the place of sub-
jectivity and truth in history in the essays collected in History and
Truth. I Something new is added, however, with the turn to memory
and forgetting, which reflects new issues that had drawn Ricoeur's
attention. The philosophical anthropology that had always been
present in his work is now more clearly articulated as one of what
he calls 'the capable human being'.
2
This is not only somebody with
a unique personal identity. It is someone who lives in a world with
others and in institutions of various kinds. It is within this frame-
work that every capable human being acts and is responsible for his
or her actions. In this sense all these last books can be considered
as contributions to the unfolding of this anthropology in relation
to Ricoeur's ethics of a good life with and for others in just insti-
tutions. They also stand on their own as significant philosophical
contributions.
109
REMEMBERING, FORGETIING, FORGIVING
Memory, History, Forgetting begins by taking up memory as a topic
in its own right. The problem of continuity and discontinuity again
plays a central role in that one of the questions for Ricoeur is to what
extent historians are dependent on memory and to what extent they
go beyond it. Is it not the case that historians, with their critical
perspective on the past, finally must move beyond memory? This
question is strengthened if we acknowledge that historians today are
able to write a history of memory, in the sense of a history of what
people have said about memory or how people have used it to
commemorate significant past events. This latter use of commemo-
rative memory, along with its possible abuse, will lead to Ricoeur's
concluding reflections on forgetting.
Ricoeur begins by distinguishing memory from imagination. It is
easy to confound the two in that they both appeal to the idea of an
image, to an image of the past in the case of what we remember or
what historians produce. But if memory and history are simply
reducible to a use of our imagination, this leaves open the possibil-
ity that any 'image' of the past we remember or that historians may
produce is simply a fiction. What would be called for, then, would be
a hermeneutics of suspicion in the strong sense ofa Freud, Marx or
Nietzsche. To show why this is not so, Ricoeur again uses a phe-
nomenological approach. Memory and imagination are distinguish-
able in terms of both their operative intentionality and the object
they intend. In both cases their object is something absent, but in the
case of memory it is not absent in the sense of being unreal or
feigned, but rather as 'having been' The intended object of memory,
in other words, is, as Aristotle had already said, 'of the past' This
question of the pastness of the past interests Ricoeur more than any
question about how the brain records or stores memory. Why is it,
he asks, that what we remember, we remember as past? Must we not
even go further and say that without memory we would have no idea
or experience of the past as past, hence no idea of time as lived?
Furthermore, this remembered past once was real and still may be
said to be real in its own way if our ontology can include and make
sense of this reality status of 'having been'
Next, if what memory gives us is an image of the past, the ques-
tion arises how 'faithful' this image is to what it represents. Ricoeur's
proposed answer is that the kind of truth involved here depends as
110
much on the idea of veracity as on that of a correspondence between
what is remembered and what actually happened in the past. In the
end it takes an appeal to and acceptance of a different memory in
order to disprove a remembered memory.
To show this, Ricoeur appeals to the fact that there is a distinction
between memories that just come to us involuntarily and those which
are actively sought out; he refers to these latter instances as examples
of , recollection' Here is an example of what he means: typically, I do
not have to do any work or make an effort to remember my name,
which was given to me in the past. But ask me what happened on such
and such day in my past, and some effort will be required in order to
remember, and I may not succeed in doing so. Recollection, therefore,
depends on a specific capacity to remember, one of the constitutive
capacities of the capable human being, one that we must add to those
of being able to speak, to narrate, and to understand narratives.
Secondly, Ricoeur notes that we distinguish between memorY.,and
habit in that habits are active in an ongoing way in the present in y s
that memory, particularly as recollection, is not. It is only in an odd
sense that we might say that I have to 'remember' how to ride a
bicycle in order to do so. Thirdly, there is the still more striking case
that we can remember having forgotten something. Finally, there is
the 'small miracle' (MHF, 39) of recognizing that we do remember
something. This has two sides: we remember what it is that we
remember and we recognize that we do remember it. This gives yet
another example of reflexivity both in our lived experience and in the
language we use to express this experience.
As for the memory image, when there is one, we have to ask what
sort of image this is. Like all images it 'presents' something to us. The
difficulty is to make sense of the fact that what is presented is some-
thing absent in that it is already past - in the present, something is
presented 'as' past. Memory therefore is a special case of a more
general phenomenon of presentation or what phenomenology calls
'presentification' But memory is differentiated from this more
general phenomenon in that it both recalls and repeats what it pre-
sents: it re-presents it. Why do we trust this moment of putting this
past something into an image - and when do we not or should we
not do so? Before taking up these questions, Ricoeur discusses some
well-known examples of how people have sought to train their
memory and increase their skill at remembering. This allows him to
construct a typology of uses of memory that can be set in parallel
111
with and illuminate their contrary forms, abuses of memory. These
negative examples include blocked memories, manipulated ones,
and abusive uses of commemoration. Blocked memories call for
something like a therapeutic approach; manipulated ones are a
problem in that they threaten our narrative identities; and obligatory
or imposed ones refer to those cases 'where commemoration rhymes
with rememoration' (MHF, 57). 'The temptation then is great to
transform this plea [for commemoration] into a claim on behalf of
memory in opposition to history' (MHF, 87). Ricoeur's initial con-
clusion is that recognizing these possible abuses of memory indicates
that there is a fundamental vulnerability to memory even while we
are dependent upon it for the very idea of the past.
Next, he introduces the idea of a possible collective memory,
arising out of work in sociology. The idea of such a memory renews
the emphasis on the question 'who?' in Time and Narrative in that we
can always ask whose memory it is. We know from Oneself as
Another that we can use any of the personal pronouns to answer this
question. It is my memory, your memory, her memory, our memory,
their memory. So if we limit memory to individuals we run the risk
of isolating recalled memories by making them depend on specific
egos, but if we allow for collective memory we run the risk of losing
an answer to the question 'who remembers?' in a cdllective, anony-
mous 'who' that can turn into what Heidegger called the 'they' This
is the 'they' of 'they say', which really is no one at all. Ricoeur holds
therefore that these two forms of memory should not be set in simple
opposition to each other, but rather allotted to different universes
of discourse, ones that perhaps have today become alienated from
each other. But for him, the priority will always fall on the side of
individual memory.
One reason individual memory is so important is that it is closely
linked with the inwardness associated with selfhood and personal
experience: these are my memories, this was my experience, I remem-
ber I was there. Such a sense of the mineness of lived selfhood again
raises the question of the continuity over time of this 'me' - just as we
may say that collective memory in its way is associated with the
endurance over time of a group or community, whether we speak of
it in the first, second or third person. However, there is danger if we
make this continuity depend solely on memory, as John Locke does
for the case of individual identity. If memory is lost, blocked or
denied, our selfhood and with it personal identity too will apparently
112
be lost or denied. Yet we need also to acknowledge that as time passes,
the things we remember or can remember do fall away, so to speak; a
kind of split gets introduced between what and who we were and who
and what we are today. Should we say, then, that a communal or col-
lective memory is what ensures the continuity of both individual and
communal identity? Ricoeur argues that while collective or commu-
nal memory does playa part, we must not attribute all responsibility
for individual selfbood and memory to it, if only because the relation
between individual and collective memory is one of analogy, not of
strict identity. We cannot simply derive one form of memory from the
other, although we can recognize those uses of language in which
these forms of memory intersect.
Our use of possessive forms in speaking of memory indicate one
such point of intersection. Memory and memories always 'belong
to' someone or some people. As such, then, memory is something we
ascribe to its possessor, thereby imputing responsibility for it to this
individual or group. But, Ricoeur adds, there is a difference betwlen
ascribing something to oneself and ascribing it to individual others,
even to a collective other, that must not be overlooked. It is not that
such ascription to others is superimposed on ascription to oneself,
but rather that they are coextensive as is indicated by the very way
we speak of memory and remembering. The real question arises
rather when we ask how our remembering is fulfilled or confirmed.
This is why Ricoeur's argument eventually will turn to history and
how historians' work provides a clear example of the critique of
memories.
There are also intermediate levels of forms of memory that need to
be considered; for example, the shared memories of people who are
close to one another differs phenomenologically from those shared by
large numbers of people who may never encounter one another face
to face. The distinction introduced here between self, close or intimate
others, and distant others will playa large role in this book. It also
figures prominently in Ricoeur's ongoing reflections on justice and
how the just figures in his ethics with its quest for a good life wi th and
for others in just institutions. From this, we can see that he has moved
beyond his initial formulation of how the teleological principle of his
ethics unfolds by acknowledging that the term 'others' is more
complex than he had originally thought. Therefore, in this new book,
not only is there the ontological dimension of the otherness of the
past to consider, which is not the otherness of the other person, but
113
also the fact. that other selves themselves occupy a spectrum that
ranges from those close and well known to me, to large numbers of
distant others, to everybody. This spectrum is one reason Ricoeur
emphasizes the importance of the play of scales found in the histories
recounted by historians.
Thus, Ricoeur finds new questions that have to do with the epis-
temology of historical research and writing. One of these questions
is the extent to which historians must be said to be dependent upon
memory and to what extent they go beyond it. Another concerns
what we can call the transhistorical dimension of memory, memory
that goes beyond anyone individual's life time and that may extend
over very long time spans, at the limit, over time itself. These two
questions meet when we ask how the truth of the historian's written
history stands in relation to the veracity of an individual or group's
reported memories.
To respond to this question, Ricoeur returns to what we can learn
from the ways historians do history, from their research to their
writing up their results. Using a label borrowed from Michel de
Certeau, he sums up this process as the 'historiographical operation'
Newer developments in the writing of history that had appeared after
the publication of Time and Narrative also influence his thinking
about this historiographical operation. Beyond the emphasis of
the Annales historians on the long time span and social facts that
changed slowly or repeated over time, many European historians had
returned to a focus on individuals and events, particularly those indi-
viduals low down the social scale, whose experience had to be teased
from the remaining historical documentation and traces. This change
of focus can be placed under the headings of microhistory and the
history of mentalities, where the emphasis is largely on how individ-
uals, especially those of the lower classes, conceive of and negotiate
their day-to-day lives in a society they may not fully comprehend or
control. There also was an ongoing debate about how historians
should or could deal with the destructive events of the Second World
War, specifically the death camps and the trauma of those who expe-
rienced them.
In speaking of the historiographical operation, Ricoeur first
wants to deemphasize the idea that the historian works in discrete
stages: first gathering documents, then examining and criticizing
them, then writing up the history text that results. We make such dis-
tinctions to see how historians work, but in fact these stages overlap
114
in such a way that we cannot understand any of them apart from the
others. As Ricoeur puts it, 'Each of the three operations of the his-
toriographical operation stands as a base for the other two, inas-
much as they serve successively as referents for the other two' (MHF,
137). It is the project of writing of history that runs through all
of them. This is why his main question is why can we be confident
about what historians say about the past? Here the question of the
historian's relation to memory returns in force.
Ricoeur introduces his discussion by returning to Plato's famous
attack on writing in the Phaedrus. Is writing a remedy for the weak-
ness of memory or does it poison memory? Better, when is it one or the
other of these possibilities? In other words, when does history serve
memory by reactivating and in some sense preserving the past? When
does history abuse or harm memory? The first requirement for answer-
ing these questions is to acknowledge the importance of historians'
work in the archives. This is where they find the documentary evidence
that serves as a warrant for what they say and write. But the mate!fials
found in archives are themselves, Ricoeur emphasizes, derived from
the testimony of individual memories: 'we have nothing better than
testimony, in the final analysis, to assure ourselves that something did
happen in the past, which someone attests having witnessed in person.
and that the principal, and at times our only, recourse, when we lack
other types of documentation, remains the confrontation among tes-
timonies' (MHF, 147). Yet historians do more than accept such testi-
mony, for in recounting what happened, they expand the sense of
space and time beyond what either the documents or the testimonies
they contain actually say. For example, the original reference to the
lived experience of a lived here and now is expanded thanks to the use
of the calendar and historical periodization, as already signalled in
Time and Narrative. A more geometric space is also introduced, one
that can be plotted on a map, where no place is necessarily more priv-
ileged than any other. Another addition occurs through the reference
to the encompassing historical time whose own system of dating is
finally extrinsic to the events recounted: 'the present moment with its
absolute "now" becomes a particular date among all the ones whose
exact calculation is allowed by the calendar. As concerns the time
of memory in particular, the "another time" of the remembered past
is henceforth inscribed within the "before that" of the dated past'
(MHF, 155). This is a time that is neither cyclic nor linear, but rather
dependent on the history recounted.
3
115
Testimony, too, is affected by the historians' research in the
archive in that 'it reappears at the end of the epistemological inquiry
at the level of the representation of the past through narrative,
rhetorical devices, and images' (MHF, 161). As Ricoeur's argument
unfolds, it is the status of this concept of 'representation', of the his-
torian's representation of the past, that moves to centre stage as
most problematic. But even at the stage of testimony itself, before it
is deposited in archives, the question can arise whether it can be
trusted, so the historians' criticism is not something simply imported
from the outside. We see this once we recognize that any testimony
about the past brings three factors into play: a first-person reference
to the person giving the testimony, a use of past-tense verbs, and a
claim relating to a specific time and place. In effect, such testimony
finally says 'I was there.' This applies analogously even to material
traces of the past which bear witness to it. While the historian finally
can criticize such testimony by confronting it with other testimony,
the original witness can only say 'I was there, I remember '
Therefore a social dimension or an appeal to a social bond enters
into play at every level of such suspicion about testimony in that
confidence in the word of another is ultimately what is at issue, as is
the capacity of human beings to exchange confidences.
This is why the evidence for what historians say must always be
traceable back to some form of documentation. But these docu-
ments become evidence only because the historian approaches them
with a question, where this question already begins to distance the
document as possible evidence from the original testimony it bears.4
In this sense, a historical document, whatever form it may take, is
already more than just a trace of the past. It is a means to discover
facts about the past. Yet, Ricoeur cautions, vigilant epistemology
will guard here against the illusion that what we call a fact coincides
with what really happened, or with the living memory of eyewitness,
as if the facts lay sleeping in the documents until the historians
extracted them' (MHF, 178). The historical fact is not the past event
but a means to represent this event, which is why we can raise the
question of the truth status of any historical fact. Obviously, this is
a truth that depends on the historian's method and can only be
refuted by taking this into account. Ultimately, though, we are
driven back to the question of the trustworthiness of the sponta-
neous testimony that is the basis for any historical document. We
can question this testimony, but eventually we must concede that we
116
cannot question everything without turning critique itself into a
form of conviction, a point Ricoeur had already emphasized in
Critique and Conviction. What is at issue therefore is to establish how
the historiographical operation can legitimately be said to support
such testimony through a measured exercise of questioning it.
This brings us back to the question of the relation between expla-
nation and understanding, so central to hermeneutics, and already
considered in Time and Narrative in regard to history. Ricoeur
adds to that discussion a new emphasis on how the explanation-
understanding relation which he now ties even more closely
together by writing it as explanation/understanding - is closely tied
to the way documented facts are interconnected in both historical
research and writing. Imagination plays an important role in bring-
ing this about through the way it distinguishes and apportions the
objects referred to by considering them in relation to human reality
as a social fact. Two factors are especially important here. One is the
constitution of the social bond, as what allows people to Jive
together. The other is the problem of identity attached to our social
existence. Interpretation comes into play in the way historians make
sense of the interplay of such social existence and identity at all
three levels of the historiographical operation because what they
aim at is a representation of the past, a representation that is not
simply a fiction.
In order to give more content to his discussion of how the histo-
riographical operation functions, Ricoeur turns next to the history
of mentalities, where a mentality is taken to be something constitu-
tive of the social bond but also expressive of it, although in the end
he does not find this is the best way to label what is at issue.
5
He
draws further evidence from the fact that histories are written on
different scales, from that which is applied to one obscure individual
in a small village only reachable through others' testimony to those
that speak of the large-scale social patterns of long time span history
or of broad geographical areas. What most draws his attention,
however, is how the interplay of these different scales shows us some-
thing about how the historiographical operation works in practice,
even when all the different scales that may be used cannot simply be
related to each other in terms of a single temporal coordinate system
or map. From this play of scales and their possible interaction,
however, comes the historical representation, said to be a faithful
representation of the past.
117
A further question, therefore, is how more precisely to character-
ize this representation, which is always the result of an interpretation,
because interpretation is operative at all three levels of the historio-
graphical operation. It is an 'image' of the past, Ricoeur agrees, but
not in the sense of an exact copy, if only because of the role played
by the scale chosen, which can vary and in varying will bring out
different details. Not a copy, the historian's representation of the past
is more like an icon, something we 'see through' to what really is at
issue.
6
To express this, Ricoeur returns to a notion introduced in Time
and Narrative, but not really developed in detail there.? Using a neol-
ogism, he calls it representance and means by this that the historian's
representation of the past can be said to 'stand for' (in an active
sense) the past. As such, this 'standing for' is not a matter of simply
putting into words something that was already there, for the histo-
rian's use of narrative contributes not only to what is said but how it
is said, but neither is representance completely a matter of invention.
What the historian produces stands at the boundary where invention
and discovery no longer can be distinguished.
The privileged form this takes is, of course, narration, and with it
an emplotment of the recounted events or other phenomena.
'Representation in its narrative aspect does not add something
coming from the outside to the documentary and explanatory
phases, but rather accompanies and supports them' (MHF, 238).
One way it does so is by introducing the idea of narrative coherence
among events and regarding identities over time. Another way is by
bringing to bear, explicitly or implicitly, some moral evaluation.
Here is the tie to the question whether the historian's representation
can really come to terms with horrific events, ones that we must
condemn as morally unacceptable - and that we may suspect are
finally unrepresentable. An important factor here is that the plot
imposed on the past by any narrative form both integrates what is
recounted and takes a distance on it, opening the way to what one
hopes will be ajustjudgement. This is not always assured, of course,
since historical narrative also makes use of rhetorical devices in its
account and can therefore itself be criticized. Ricoeur's point,
however, is that it is the necessary use of documentary proof and
forms of causal and teleological explanation that finally serves as a
check against simply presenting a fiction claiming to be a history,
even when it may take another historian's history or the testimony
of survivors to show this.
118
Still, Ricoeur concedes, we can raise the question whether there is
an unavoidable limit to historical representation, whatever forms it
may take. There are two possibilities to consider: have the available
cultural forms of representation become so exhausted they no
longer work? Are there events that by their very nature resist repre-
sentation, even while they cry out for it? The central example here is
the death camps. As so often, Ricoeur responds to this challenge by
opposing the two possibilities just listed as extreme cases, ones where
thought breaks down, but where we can examine the conceptual
space opened between them taken as limit ideas. This leads him to
say that a good part of what is at issue in raising the question of the
limits of historical representation has to do with a capacity for
reception on our part. Can we bear to know this history, to remem-
ber it? He suggests that what is at issue in pondering how to repre-
sent what seems unrepresentable stems from therapeutic as well as
epistemological concerns. The demand for truth in such extreme
cases should be seen as closely tied to what Freud called a worliof
mourning, along with the work of overcoming resistances to this
process. Recalling, without citing, his own reading of Freud,
Ricoeur further suggests that there may in fact be a gain from such
a process, a kind of surplus of meaning owing to the work of reflec-
tion involved in writing such histories. If we are still suspicious of
the result, he points out, this is a suspicion that affects not only his-
torians' representations of the past, but the explanation/under-
standing, documentation and archival stages as well, and even their
appeal finally to memory.
We overcome such suspicion only by respecting the historio-
graphical operation in all its dimensions. We can do so because, as
we have seen, 'the seed of criticism' was already planted in the orig-
inal testimony that stands behind and supports the historiographi-
cal operation,
8
hence it is not something simply added from the
outside. The possibility of criticism is always already there in that all
testimony is open to the retort, 'I/we don't believe you.' But this does
not disprove it, and as we also have seen, Ricoeur thinks in the end
we must appeal to the conviction expressed by some testimony,
including that of our own memory, if we are to say anything at all.
What we must keep in mind, however, is that any question arising in
regard to the historical product of this critical process finally is itself
a question about the past. The historical representation of the past
gives us an image in the present of an absent thing, 'but the absent
119
thing itself gets split into disappearance into and existence in the
past' (MHF, 280); it is a representation of the past as 'having been',
and here epistemology borders on ontology, on the ontology of our
historical condition as beings that exist in the world.
It is left to hermeneutical philosophy to explore the conditions of
possibility of this ontology, where such conditions are existential in
that they shape our understanding of our existence as intelligible
and meaningful. They do so because they structure our existence as
worldly temporal agents. Ricoeur admits that what hermeneutics
can give here does not amount to a logical proof; rather is something
that we appropriate and take up into our own lives by incorporating
it into our self-understanding and action. At its limit, then, this
philosophy leads us to the question of forgetting, not only as an
enemy of memory, but as necessary for such existential appropria-
tion. Beyond this question of forgetting we will also encounter that
of forgiveness.
TO FORGIVE IS NOT TO FORGET
If we look back at Ricoeur's earlier work from this point, we may
recognize that the idea of a philosophical anthr()pology and its
ontology runs through all of his work, and it gains in depth and
complexity over time. He had begun with the question of human
agency in relation to the question of freedom and its limits, added
the acknowledgement that such freedom can be misused, anticipat-
ing thereby his later discussion of ethics and a just form of social
existence, then recognized more and more that we have to take seri-
ously the temporality and historicity of such existence along with
their implications for action in the present. A new question here is
whether this anthropology must also incorporate the possibility that
our existence is not only historical, but that this historicity can in
some ways be a burden for us, if only because, following Nietzsche,
we must ask in what ways history may limit our freedom and action
in the present. To answer such a question requires considering in
greater depth our own existence as historical beings and the ways in
which we make sense of history.
An echo of Ricoeur's concern about our possibly over-estimating
the Cartesian cogito returns here. The search for objective historical
knowledge may itself turn into an unjustified claim to absolute
knowledge. Ricoeur had already criticized such a possibility in the
120
third volume of Time and Narrative in rejecting Hegel's philosophy of
history. Here his argument turns more on the necessity to appeal to
some non-historical categories in order even to conceive of history
and to do history. One such category - and a controversial one - is
the idea of 'modernity' as indicating something radically new in
history, something that represents a radical break with everything
that had gone before. Another is the very idea of 'history' in the sin-
gular as opposed to 'histories' in the plural. What allows us to speak
of 'history' as a collective singular term embracing all of time?
Lastly, there is the idea of historical time itself. We have already
noted that in Time and Narrative Ricoeur sees historical time as
something constructed on the basis of two other ideas of time,
cosmic time and lived, existential time. Might it not be that such an
idea also requires the idea of something other than time, hence
something not historical? Might it not also be therefore that the very
ideas that allow us to unify history are also ones that require us to
think beyond history in some yet to be determined way? Here, "'e
return to the question of Transcendence posed in Ricoeur's earliest
work for the very claim that we are historical beings, summed up in
the idea of a fundamental historicity, is itself a historical claim, one
that goes beyond history from within it. A core question, therefore,
will be whether the circularity involved here is a vicious circle or not.
Central to Ricoeur's examination of these questions is the
analogy between the historian and the judge. Both aim at truth and
justice. Both ultimately depend on the testimony of the parties
involved. And both claim to reach a fair conclusion from a position
of impartiality. Yet from the perspective of contemporary history
and historical consciousness, no one can claim to be an absolutely
neutral third party. What is at issue therefore in comparing them has
both an epistemic and a moral dimension. And here the analogy
between the judge and historian begins to break down in that the
trial process is determined by more specific rules and even by a more
specific setting than the historian's research. Furthermore, the
judge's verdict is more definitive in that the judge has to decide,
whereas historians can prevaricate or introduce qualifying terms, or
even call for and expect further research, because they recognize that
'the writing of history is a perpetual rewriting' (MHF, 320).
But this analogy cannot be ignored today, Ricoeur believes,
because historians find themselves called upon to deal with what are
perceived to be crimes and evils on a hitherto unknown scale, horrific
121
crimes against whole peoples, even against humanity. Can they write
this history? Ricoeur answers that they are incapable of writing one
all-inclusive history that would 'include the history of the perpetra-
tors, the history of the victims, and the history of the witnesses'
(HHS, 325). They must instead aim at and can arrive at a partial con-
sensus on the basis of the histories they do write, histories meant for
an audience that includes not just the ideal types of the historian and
the judge, but also that of another third party, the citizen who is
called upon to appropriate this history into his or her understanding
and future action. The price to pay, however, is that historians need
always to be ready to start over again if they are adequately to deal
with such matters as time continues to pass.
Another test case for the possible limits on history's interpretation
of itself as 'history' is the role interpretation plays throughout the
historiographical operation. Interpretation in this sense has to do
with a second-order discourse that reflects on the whole operation
rather than with the practice of interpretation at each of its stages.
What it points to at this higher level is the conclusion that historical
facts can always be interpreted in another way. Hence there is an
inevitable degree of controversy involved in their representation,
especially since there always remains 'an impenetrable, opaque, inex-
haustible ground of personal and cultural motivations' (MHF, 337)
that historians bring to their work. This is reflected in the role 'selec-
tion' plays in the historiographical operation, not only through the
question the historian initially brings to the archive, but in the very
choice of documents to be kept there, as well as in the formulation
of any documentary proof and the choice of how to emplot the
result. A subtle interplay of personal and public reasoning is at work
here. All these points, Ricoeur concludes, show why hermeneutics
cannot allow history to claim to totalize itself, even while it can claim
validity for what it does achieve.
Another consideration regarding our historical condition follows
from this discussion. It has to do with the existential categories that
characterize the human condition as not only historical but as
expressed through the structures of what Heidegger had spoken of
as 'being-in-the world', then further explicated in terms of the
notion of 'care' Ricoeur proposes a correction to this analysis in
that Heidegger ignores the question of human embodiment,
especially as this involves what Merleau-Ponty called our 'flesh',
which is both subjective and objective. Secondly, Ricoeur questions
122
whether an ontology solely based on temporality is really able to
make possible the representation of the past by history, and before
that by memory. Thirdly, he argues that we can make sense of, under-
stand the past as past only by pairing it with 'the future quality of
the future and the present quality of the present' (MHF, 346), an
insight that will count against any tendency to confine our historical
knowledge to merely a retrospective perspective on the past or as a
form of nostalgia. Finally, therefore, any hermeneutics of our his-
torical existence will have to be able to show how to derive history
and our ability to make history (in both senses of this phrase, by
acting and by recounting) from its existential categories, something
he thinks Heidegger was unable really to do.
9
This leads Ricoeur
finally to the question of death, not so much as a question of our
own mortality but rather as a question of what debt, if any, we owe
to the dead of the past. Ricoeur argues that it is history that finally
allows us to offer them an appropriate burial.
Contrary to Heidegger, who saw death as our utmost possibilRy,
Ricoeur argues that it is something that cuts off life, but that never-
theless can be appropriated and internalized as a part of life, even
while remaining heterogeneous to our desire to live. In other words,
human beings are capable of accepting their 'having-to-die' 'At the
limit, at the horizon, loving death like a sister, after the manner of
the poverello of Assisi, remains a gift that depends on an economy
inaccessible even to an existentiell experience as singular as the
apparent stoicism of a Heidegger, the economy placed by the New
Testament under the term agape' (MHF, 358). To see this, however,
we must also face the reality of mourning, and do so in such a way
that it includes even those others who are not our close relations,
whose deaths C\in teach us a lesson we cannot learn either from our
own mortality or from that of those closest to us. This is a lesson
about the debt we owe to such others, to all such others. It is a debt
that comes down to what Ricoeur calls 'the act of sepulcher' (MHF,
365), the obligation to give them a proper burial. This is something
more than the act of burial, however. Through what Freud calls the
work of mourning it transforms the physical absence of these past
people, including the many victims of past acts, into an inner pres-
ence that accompanies us today.
Historians contribute to our recognition of this debt through
their ability not just to write the history of these past individuals, but
even to write something like a history of death, one that expands
123
our understanding of this phenomenon. In this way, they add to
Ricoeur's own effort to transform Heidegger's ontology of being-
toward-death into one of being-in-the-face-of-death, of existing-in-
the-face-of-death. We embody this in part through our ability to
reckon with time while existing in time, in part through our actions,
and in part through how we take responsibility for our actions and
those of others. Obviously, memory and history have a major role to
play here, but neither are they sufficient by themselves to provide an
answer how to do this, since such existence also must be expressed in
action in the present through what, drawing on his little ethics,
Ricoeur calls practical wisdom, something that may require a break
with past history.
Here the question of forgetting arises. It lies on the horizon of
memory since it makes no sense whatsoever to talk of forgetting if
there is no memory or remembering. Forgetting has to be considered,
however, because it 'is experienced as an attack on the reliability of
memory' (MHF, 413). Forgetting has different forms. Most obvi-
ously, there is forgetting that is caused by the erasure or destruction
of the traces of the past that make memory possible. This may be the
case, for example, in instances where our brain is damaged, but it also
applies to those other material traces historians draw upon to dis-
cover what happened in the past. Ricoeur is not directly concerned
here with what science can tell us about the anatomical basis of
memory. (He does discuss this in his dialogue with the neuroscientist,
Jean-Pierre Changeux, reported in What Makes Us Think?) But this
approach to memory and forgetting is that of an outside observer.
Ricoeur's interest here is rather on our lived experience, so his
approach is again phenomenological, driven by the question whether
we might have a duty to forget parallel to the duty to remember
implied by our debt to the past. This is a question exacerbated by the
recent emphasis on commemoration as a response to the horrors of
the recent and even the long-term past. His answer will be negative:
'one absolutely cannot speak of a duty of forgetting' (MHF, 418).
This is not to say that we can or must remember everything.
Between that which is forgotten and beyond recovery and that which
we can remember there is a place for many uses of memory and for-
getting; for example, there is room for what Ricoeur calls forgetting
held in reserve, things not currently called to mind, but available to
memory and hence not lost forever. We can even speak of this kind
of forgetting as forgetting that founds memory. To see this more
124
clearly, we need to consider the abuses as well as the uses of forget-
ting. Ricoeur lists three types of such imposed forgetting, based
on the three possible abuses of memory listed earlier. These are,
we recall, blocked memories, manipulated memories and obligated
memories. Blocked memories call for some kind of therapeutic
approach that will allow their recovery. Manipulated memories
require instead a critique of ideology that can reveal the distortion
at work on this level, as in their way do obligated memories. Ricoeur
is particularly concerned here with the practice of amnesty, espe-
cially when it says not only that no one will be prosecuted for past
deeds, but also that these cannot even be spoken of, and at limit
even recalled or remembered. This, he holds, is too much like a
magical solution to the memory of past discord or suffering and
its consequences in the present. This is why, finally, the question of
forgiveness arises.
Forgiveness constitutes the horizon of both memory and forget-
ting. 'It places a seal of incompleteness on the entire enterpllise'
(MHF, 457) in that it cannot completely make up for the unpardon-
able nature of moral evil, either in the past or the present. This is why
forgiveness is difficult and not something accomplished in a single
step. That it is possible we can see if we compare it to the act of
promise making. Whereas promising binds the agent to his act, for-
giving releases him from it. But we must also recognize an important
difference between them because on the political plane there is no
genuine possibility of a completely successful institutional expres-
sion of forgiveness. This is shown by the failure of amnesties to
achieve their stated purposes, although Ricoeur does see some hope
in the establishment of truth and reconciliation commissions, as in
South Africa, although even in these cases many participants have
admitted these bodies did not accomplish everything people hoped
they would.
Forgiveness is also difficult because there is a gap between any act
and its agent, so to forgive the one may not be to forgive the other.
Moreover, on the side of the agent, we are again faced with the ques-
tion of 'why such evil?' This is once again the question of the fault,
which when pursued goes beyond any individual agent, however evil
he may be or have been. The limit we run up against, or the region
where thought about forgiveness begins to break down, is that evil is
ultimately not justifiable. It is not rational. Hence it may need to be
answered in another way than through forgiveness, through the use
125
of the myths and symbols that speak of overcoming evil. This intro-
duces a vertical dimension into the horizontal one between victims
and their aggressors, one that in the best case recalls (or promises)
that there is forgiveness in such a way as to make forgiveness actu-
ally possible on the human plane. It also changes our discourse in
that it brings into play the language of love, a love that does not keep
score, a love that might best be thought of as an unconditional gift.
But this is not to create impunity on the legal or political level. Here
again our language has to change to take up the questions of pardon
and guilt, justice and punishment, a question we shall return to
below.
Ricoeur concludes his reflections on forgiveness by noting that it
is difficult to forgive where it has not been sought or when there is
no sign of repentance. This is a problem for history in that the
victims and the perpetrators of past wrongs may no longer be alive
either to ask for forgiveness or to give or receive it. Hope therefore
comes into play, hope that one day things will all come together and
forgiveness will be achieved, but this is something that cannot be
fully expressed in the transcendental or speCUlative language of phi-
losophy. It depends instead on what Ricoeur calls an optative use of
language and thought. This language would give expression to a
supreme form of forgetting, one characterized by 'a disposition and
a way of being in the world which would be insouciance, carefree-
ness' (MHF, 505). Until that moment, he reminds us that to forgive
is not to forget, but as his own reading of Song of Songs reminds us,
love is as strong as death. 10
OUR CAPACITY FOR MUTUAL RECOGNITION
That Ricoeur, at the end of his life, should choose to take up the
concept of recognition is not surprising given the emphasis he has
given to the question of personal and communal identity, beginning
with Time and Narrative and pursued in Oneself as Another His
emphasis on our relations to others, so central to his little ethics,
would point him in this direction, as would the contemporary discus-
sion of the 'politics of identity' Beyond these concerns, however,
Ricoeur has a larger target in mind. For one thing, as he points out at
the very beginning of The Course of Recognition, it is striking to dis-
cover that there is no established great philosophy of recognition in
the same way philosophers can name leading works in epistemology
126
or metaphysics or ethics. Beyond this, Ricoeur's reflections lead him
to a distinction he argues has not really been emphasized sufficiently
in the available discussions of recognition. This is the distinction
between reciprocal and mutual recognition. In fact, insofar as there is
a worked-out philosophy of recognition to be found either in the
history of Western philosophy or in current discussions of the poli-
tics of identity, the core thematic idea turns out at best to be that of a
reciprocal rather than mutual recognition, at least in the sense
Ricoeur wants to understand this phenomenon; that is, as something
that goes beyond reciprocal recognition and is not reducible to it.
That there is no 'widely recognized philosophical work of high
reputation' (CR, 1) on recognition to be found in the philosophical
tradition also means that Ricoeur has to adopt a starting point novel
for him. This is to begin not from the history of philosophy but by
looking at dictionaries to see what they have to say about the term
'recognition' What he finds is that there is an obvious polysemy
given in any good dictionary as to possible meanings of this term.
Indeed in French the range of possible meanings is wider than for
the corresponding term in English. Reconnaissance and its verbal
forms in French includes a much stronger sense of gratitude than
does the word 'recognition' in English - to say je suis reconnaissant
is to say 'I am grateful.' Ricoeur sees that this may provide some
opening to his concern for the specific case of mutual recognition.
His initial question is what connects the various lexical senses of
this term as we find them in a good dictionary; more specifically, can
we say what generates the order of the series of meanings we find
there? Ricoeur finds a clue in the fact that these meanings shift from
an active to a passive voice, from 'recognizing' to 'being recognized'
He further sees that this shift carries with it an increasing emphasis
on persons as it takes place, adding to his hypothesis that it may tell
us something that can get us closer to the idea of mutual recognition.
The definitions given of 'recognition' move from recognizing a thing
to recognizing oneself, to recognizing others, to, finally, being recog-
nized as oneself by others. Therefore, he asks whether we can 'pass
from the realm of the rule-governed polysemy of words from natural
language to the formation of philosophical concepts worthy of fig-
uring in a theory of recognition?' (CR, 16). Here an appeal to what
little has been said about recognition in the history of philosophy can
serve as a stepping stone. The key moments in that history - or those
leading instances of what Ricoeur calls 'events in thinking' that lead
127
to new insight into this topic - all can be read as aiming at formulat-
ing an adequate concept of what is at issue in recognition. In that
history, we find a trajectory similar to the one in the dictionary from
the active to the passive voice. So this trajectory can be interpreted
as indicating what ultimately is at stake in the idea of recognition,
mutual recognition. In the end, this history shows that there is a
demand for recognition that can only be satisfied by mutual recogni-
tion, 'where this mutual recognition either remains an unfulfilled
dream or requires procedures and institutions that elevate recogni-
tion to the political plane' (CR, 19).
Another noteworthy aspect of this historical trajectory is that
there is a noticeable shift from an emphasis on recognition as knowl-
edge - in the sense of identifying X and identifying X as Y - to a
sense that goes beyond knowing to something closer to questions
that apply to what we can call 'life together' And tied to this, the
idea of identity plays a role at each station along the way, but it too
shifts its meaning as the course of recognition unfolds, reaching a
culmination in the idea of a genuine identity, 'the one that makes us
who we are, that demands to be recognized' (CR, 21). The course of
recognition, therefore, 'not only detaches itself from knowledge but
opens the way to it' (ibid.).
At first, the emphasis is on knowledge in the sense of being able
to identify something. This occurs prior to raising any question of
truth or falsity. We identify things by distinguishing them, a trait that
will carry through to the end stage of mutual recognition in that this
is what people seek in asking for, even in demanding, recognition
from others. At the next stage, this distinguishing turns into the
question of distinguishing truth from falsity, a stage Ricoeur asso-
ciates with Descartes, where for Descartes this question of truth is
clearly subsequent to some initial act of identification. Kant adds
the idea of recognizing things in time. This is a significant step in that
it allows us to consider not only the time involved in any act of
recognition, but also the important question of recognition of the
same things over time; for example, the question of recognizing
something again as the same thing. This experience suggests that
time must be thought of not simply as succession but as somehow
accumulative in that it allows us to retain the idea of something as
enduring as the same thing as time passes. The idea of a limit test
case also arises here, that of something unrecognizable, either for
itself or as it appears and reappears in time. This is a possibility that
128
forces us to think further about what allows us to recognize some-
thing in the sense of being able to identify it. Ricoeur considers two
key examples here. The first one is the case of something we recog-
nize, that then goes away for a while before coming back again, when
we then recognize it again as the same thing, perhaps after some hes-
itation. The second, more striking case, drawn from Proust, adds
more complexity to this example in that it acknowledges that things
can change over time. Here the thing (or person) that goes away and
returns has changed its appearance in the meantime (say, by growing
older), but somehow can still finally be recognized as being the
same thing or person we had known in the past. This example clearly
resonates with the question of self-identity over time.
To get to further insight into this phenomenon Ricoeur sees that
we have to move beyond the recognition of things as things to rec-
ognizing ourselves and other selves as selves. One striking feature
here is that we recognize ourselves as different from others. In this
sense, there is a 'persistent dissymmetry' (CR, 69) in our relations ~
others that Ricoeur emphasizes more strongly than he had done in
previous works.11 Such self-recognition is closely tied to our capac-
ity to impute responsibility to ourselves and to others, a theme
Ricoeur sums up under the heading 'recognizing responsibility'
Examples of this kind of recognition can be found in history as early
as in The Odyssey with the return of Ulysses to his homeland and in
Sophocles' story of King Oedipus' final recognition and acceptance
of himself when he arrives at Colonus at the end of his life. As
Aristotle already recognized on the basis of examples like these, this
topic also introduces the question of possible deliberation about our
actions prior to doing them, returning us again to the question of
the voluntary and the involuntary, where deliberate action turns out
to be something in the power of the agent, a capacity of the capable
human being.
Examining the phenomenology of this capable human being in
greater detail, Ricoeur concludes that our capacity to act involves
attestation as well as recognition, where a fundamental difference
remains between these two notions. In terms of our use of language,
attestation belongs to the discourse of testimony, whereas recognition
is linked more to the processes of identification and self-identification.
Yet these two intersect in the certitude and assurance we express when
we say 'I can' Beyond this, we also say and experience that we can
impute our action to our self and take responsibility for it. Moreover,
129
because we distinguish ourselves from others in saying '1', the question
of recognition by others who impute my actions to me already arises.
This can turn into the question of mutual recognition when we ask to
what extent our self-recognition requires and even depends upon this
recognition by others. Such recognition by others, Ricoeur holds, is
necessary for attaining a full sense of ourselves as responsible selves,
even if it is not always given, and sometimes is even deliberately with-
held or denied.
Ricoeur again finds an important guideline in our ability to make
and keep promises. Promises not only involve our ability to commit
ourselves using language; they also bring into play our relation to
others as the possible beneficiaries of our promises. It is also neces-
sary to reverse this emphasis and recognize that we ourselves are able
to make promises only on the basis of having ourselves already been
the beneficiary of the promises and actions of others. In this way, the
idea of the debt we owe to others comes to the fore, as does an
increased acknowledgement that any phenomenology of the capable
human being must also consider the social capacities that make all
this possible. Ricoeur takes this latter notion up in terms of a dis-
cussion of social practices and collective representations, where
these enable our social capacities to actualize themselves. Here the
idea of symbolic mediations comes clearly into plaY,even if we allow
that a symbolic function was already operative in language at the
level of saying 'I can' What now becomes more obvious, however, if
we had overlooked it earlier, is that language itself is a social phe-
nomenon, thereby justifying the reversal from an emphasis on the
individual self to a more explicitly intersubjective, albeit dialectical,
model.
The question of how social practices and collective representa-
tions enable the social bond is complex. They allow us to act and to
make history, but they do not exclude the possibility of conflict in
that they also affect our capacity to make choices. Our capacities,
therefore, are not ethically neutral, and in examining them, the dis-
tinction between description and prescription ultimately breaks
down. Returning to examples drawn from the history of philosophy,
Ricoeur takes up the young Hegel's debate with Thomas Hobbes
over the source of recognition in the constituting of the social bond.
Hobbes claimed to eliminate any moral basis for the social bond,
reducing it to a purely naturalistic outcome based solely on our fear
of a violent death. Hegel's rejoinder to Hobbes was that in fact we
130
desire recognition, where this desire is not something added to who
we are but is already constitutive of our existence. Yet Hegel was
never able to develop this insight beyond the possibility of recipro-
cal recognition and therefore, Ricoeur concludes, he never really
could show why the possibility of misrecognition in the sense of
a deliberate refusal of recognition is immoral. The same critique
applies, Ricoeur believes, to contemporary discussions of the poli-
tics of identity, which draw on Hegel's idea of a desire, even a strug-
gle for recognition, while setting aside his metaphysics of identity.
The strength of these positions is that they do reflect the shift from
the active to the passive voice, to the importance of wanting to be
recognized for any theory of recognition. But, like Hegel, these
recent theories of recognition do not really get beyond the idea of
reciprocal recognition, which can all too easily be limited to narrow
contexts, such as commercial exchanges. In these narrow cases, the
selves involved are simply those required for participating in the
exchange; nothing more about them needs to be known or k n o ~
edged. Beyond this reduction to what he sees as a diminished self,
Ricoeur wants to argue that mutual recognition goes beyond every
explanation in terms of a struggle for recognition present in Hegel
and his successors. Mutual recognition depends more on 'states of
peace' than on those of struggle and conflict.
To show this, Ricoeur considers cases where recognition is given
without the necessity of conflict and struggle. They occur on three
levels, an affective, a judicial, and a social level. On the affective level,
others who love us and give us approbation recognize us and we rec-
ognize them in return. A good example here is what Ricoeur calls
recognition in terms of a lineage. I recognize myself because my
parents and family recognize me as one of them. Without this recog-
nition by others whom I love and trust, and who love and trust me,
I would not be who I am. At this level, therefore, the result of mutual
recognition is self-confidence and misrecognition will threaten, if not
undercut, this self-confidence. On the judicial level, relations of
respect replace the emphasis on trust given and returned, both as
regards the application of norms held to be universal and as regards
my own person as free and equal to every other person. So at this
level, what is at stake through mutual recognition are forms of self-
respect. This enlarges and enriches our sense of selfhood, because
the ideas of personal rights and responsibilities on a large scale come
into play. We can clarify this further by applying a division into civil,
131
political and social rights, because doing so allows us to identify new
forms of misrecognition in terms of the possible kinds of exclusion,
alienation and oppression that can occur at this level. At the limit,
the question of human rights will arise, and with it that of human
dignity. Finally, beyond any question of respect, there is the level of
social esteem, which 'functions to sum up all the modes of mutual
recognition that exceed the mere recognition of the quality of rights
among free subjects' (CR, 202). Shared values, which may vary over
time and from place to place, provide the context for such social
esteem. When disagreements do arise, they point to the possibility of
understanding lifeworlds other than our own, 'a capacity we can
compare to that of learning a foreign language to the point of being
able to appreciate one's own language as one among many' (CR,
209).12 Issues regarding authority arise on each of these levels, par-
ticularly regarding hierarchies not just of status, but of command
and obedience. This latter is something Ricoeur thinks necessary for
any enduring form of social life, so he does not see mutual recogni-
tion as abolishing all forms of either hierarchy or authority. 13 In the
end, it is the possibility of social esteem signalled by mutual recog-
nition that is constitutive of the social bond that makes possible our
life together at all three levels.
As a further argument against any attempt to reduce all such
forms of mutual recognition to the outcome of a struggle, Ricoeur
points out that such an account will always run the risk of turning
the quest for recognition into an interminable, even an insatiable,
one - what Hegel called a bad infinity. This is not to say that experi-
ences of peaceful recognition by themselves allow us to resolve all
the issues involved in the very concept of a struggle, much less all
actual instances of conflict. 'The certitude that accompanies states
of peace offers instead a confirmation that the moral motivation for
struggles of recognition is not illusory' (CR, 218).
This leaves the question in what way are such peaceful experiences
of mutual recognition themselves based upon symbolic mediations?
A problem arises if we attempt to think of mutual recognition as a gift
we give to one another. The problem here is whether all gift giving
turns in to a logic of reciprocity in that a gift in return will be expected,
making possible new conflicts. Ricoeur answers that we have to think
instead of the gift of mutual recognition in terms of agape, love that
does not demand something in return, a love that does not calculate
and that is even characterized by insouciance, a love that goes beyond
132
the demands of justice. Moreover, there is usually something ceremo-
nial about such gift giving when it occurs. More specifically, what
breaks the cycle of reciprocity in such cases is that the gift given in the
case of mutual recognition is priceless, so generous that it does not
call for restitution but rather the response of a 'second first gift' (CR,
242), a gift that we can give to other others. Here the close connection
between recognition and gratitude so evident in French comes into
play. 'Gratitude lightens the weight of obligation to give in return and
reorients this toward a generosity equal to the one that led to the first
gift' (CR, 243). It does so by opening a gap between the first giving
and receiving and the second giving when having received. This affects
both the evaluation of the value of what is given and received, and the
time it may take to complete this process. It is one reason there is
usually something festive about such symbolic exchanges. They take
us outside the everyday world of reciprocal exchanges and introduce
a note of hope expressed more in an optative voice than in a descrip-
tive or normative one, freeing us from the lust for power or the t h r ~ t
and fascination of violence.
If there is an element of struggle in mutual recognition, it is as a
struggle 'against the misrecognition of others at the same time that it
is a struggle for recognition of oneself by others' (CR, 258). Such
misrecognition - which runs the spectrum from disregard to disre-
spect, to contempt and even denial of the other's humanity - is
always possible because of the fundamental dissymmetry between
oneself and others. In order to integrate mutuality into this dissym-
metry, Ricoeur says that we must return to forgetting. If we can
'forget' the dissymmetry, we may then be able to recognize the 'in
between' of our mutual relatedness. For what we exchange though
this space are gifts, not places, and this 'protects mutuality against the
pitfalls of a fusional union, whether in love, friendship, or fraternity
on a communal or cosmopolitan level' (CR, 263). Mutual recogni-
tion, in other words, establishes a just distance between us and, with
it, a surplus of meaning in which otherness is affirmed twice over:
'other is the one who gives and the one who receives; other is the one
who receives and the one who gives in return' (CR, 263).
THE JUST
The idea of ajust distance brings us to Ricoeur's last essays published
under the general heading of 'the just' The Just and Reflections on
133
the Just are collections of lectures and essays rather than books
written to present one overall argument. A number of the essays are
devoted to other thinkers - Rawls, Weber, Kant, Arendt, Walzer
among them - and show us Ricoeur working out his own position in
relation to them. These essays are worth reading for their own sake,
as examples of how Ricoeur reads others' works and seeks to think
with them, rather than against them. From our perspective, however,
it is important to consider the two themes that tie these essays
together: the idea of justice and, beyond it, that of the just. When we
do that, we see that we can situate his reflections between two poles.
On the one side stands political philosophy in a broad sense, and
more specifically a concern for questions having to do with law and
its application through the courts. On the other side we find a broader
philosophical reflection, one that seeks a way to do justice to justice
through an examination of the broader category of the just. The
question of the just itself, of course, was already implicated in
Ricoeur's ethics aimed at a life lived with others injust institutions.
Ricoeur's essays addressing the status of law and the role of the
legal system stem largely from his participation in seminars and con-
ferences with judges, legal theorists and historians in the last decade
of his life. The central issue in these essays is how the idea of justice
relates to the legal system and the rule of law. SOrr1ething beyond a
strictly defined notion of legal justice is at stake here, for, as Ricoeur
notes, Aristotle had already seen that the law always deals with cases
in their universal aspect, not in terms of their uniqueness. The just
extends beyond the problem of legal justice, even while incorporat-
ing it. This broader idea of the just arises when we take an adjective
- a just solution - and turn it into an abstract noun, concerning
which we then try to grasp the concept this might express. But this
is a concept that still carries the connotation of applying to concrete
and particular cases. It is this double sense of the just as both
abstract and concrete that Rieoeur seeks to make sense of.
One reason he turns to this more general idea of the just is that
political philosophy gets caught up in the question of how to legiti-
mate government or the rule of law, without addressing the problem
of evil by asking 'why evil?' Hence it does not really help us to deal
with the problem of the fault. Still, looking at the questions of the
status of the law and the idea of rights in modern society does give
us a handhold. It allows us to see how these questions work out in
practice in the courtroom in relation to specific instances of conflicts
134
and crimes. In the short run, the trial process puts an end to a spe-
cific conflict when the judge pronounces a verdict and, where
required, imposes a penalty. Ideally, this sets the parties involved at
a just distance, without necessarily bringing about full mutual recog-
nition or reconciliation between them. Still, in the long run, this
process does contribute to the social peace that makes mutual recog-
nition possible. It does so by strengthening the social bond that
allows us to live together.
Ricoeur acknowledges that this is an ideal picture and that there
are many concrete problems with which the legal system today must
struggle; for example, how to assign responsibility in conflicts that
arise at the level of institutions. The law wants to assign responsi-
bility to some individual, but who this might be is not always clear
in the case of actions stemming from decisions taken in large
bureaucracies. In this regard, Ricoeur willingly involved himself in
arguments over who if anyone was to blame and how to s ~ i g n
responsibility - in the public outcry that arose (exacerbated bl'the
media) regarding HIV-tainted blood transfusions in the early
years of the AIDS crisis in France. This eventually led to a trial of
former government officials who were accused of being responsible.
Ricoeur believed that in this case the close association the law.
assumes between responsibility and guilt breaks down. A govern-
ment official may have been in charge, but how and where a 'deci-
sion' was or was not made remains obscure. His own position is that
what is at issue should be seen more as a political question than a
legal one, and therefore a just solution is more likely to be found in
the political forum rather than the law courts. 14
Related to this example he also asks whether contemporary
society mistakenly tries to deal with such problems by shifting the
focus from individual behaviour to the concept of risk and attempts
to eliminate it, or at least to compensate victims for disasters when
they occur. Clearly, one danger here is the idea that a society can
eliminate all risk from life, and that it therefore has the obligation to
impose regulations that prevent people from doing things that might
injure them. Again, who makes these decisions? Another worry is
that if we agree that all risk cannot be eliminated, then does it follow
that society must compensate any and all victims for their suffering
in a way that restores them to health or to what they had before, or
to what they should have in light of their current situation? Ricoeur
is suspicious of the utopian aspect here insofar as the utopian ideal
135
no longer functions as a critical perspective but as a state actually to
be realized. His own emphasis on the plurality of forms politics may
take and their inherent fragility is one factor influencing his think-
ing here, as is his belief that the best we can achieve in these matters
is what he calls a just distance among those involved.
One other topic related to the legal system that concerns Ricoeur
has to do with punishment, particularly when it involves imprison-
ment. He does not speak about this at length but clearly he is con-
cerned that contemporary society has found no way of rehabilitating
and reintegrating convicted criminals back into society, restoring the
just distance that makes life together possible. This is a question that
overlaps those of amnesty and pardon, but in the end Ricoeur has
no concrete solutions to propose to these questions. He can only try
to make clear why they are pressing issues.
At this point we can read his reflections as shifting toward the
broader ideas of justice and the just beyond such specific examples.
Two threads tie these two ideas. The first one comes from Ricoeur's
continuing reflections on the 'little' ethics he had presented in
Oneself as Another; the other stems from a more direct focus on what
we mean by the just. If we follow the first thread, the question of the
just arises, as already mentioned, as we examine the movement from
the ethical aim to its application in concrete cases at tM level of prac-
tical wisdom, particularly where this involves the question of insti-
tutions. If we connect the idea of the just that arises here closely to
that of justice, this leads to placing the emphasis on those cases
where many others are involved, for Ricoeur agrees with Rawls that
justice is a virtue of social institutions and relations, not something
that applies to isolated individuals.
15
From another angle, however,
the idea of the just runs through all three stages of this ethics, from
its teleological aim through the level of norms to that of practical
wisdom and back again.
16
For both these readings, the idea of the
just as characterizing the idea of a just distance is central. This
brings us to the second thread, the more explicit question of the
nature of the just.
The question of the just first arises with the indignant cry that
something is not just, not fair, whether it be an unfair distribution of
some good, an unkept promise, or a disproportionate punishment.
Ricoeur sees in this indignation the origin of the demand for a just
distance, one that sets the antagonists back into a workable, if not
ideal, relationship. A major obstacle here is the desire for vengeance
136
and the belief that it is up to each individual or group to obtain it
themselves. Beyond the fact that such vengeance almost always takes
the form of violence, there is the danger that the quest for vengeance
will turn into the vendetta, an unending cycle of parties trying to
make up for harm perceived to have been done to them. This is why
the idea of a rule of law is so important. It introduces a neutral third
party to arbitrate between the opposed parties as well as a setting
circumscribed by careful rules that turn the conflict into one of
words, not physical violence. This is not to say that force completely
disappears. Ricoeur agrees with Max Weber that the modern state
holds the monopoly on the use of violence through its police powers
and penal system, where these are governed by a system of laws that
apply equally to everyone. Another important idea at this level is
the idea of impartiality, incarnated in a third party, the judge. This
development helps us overcome the spirit of vengeance.
Finally, Ricoeur's earlier work, particularly regarding how the self
is constituted through its dialogical relations with others, helps usrfto
make sense of the just. He adds to this horizontal relation between
selves an emphasis on a vertical dimension that may also be at work
where the just solution prevails. This vertical first dimension appears
in the role that hierarchy plays in human relations, whether through
the recognition of superior authority or through the division of roles
that means some give orders and some obey. If we apply these
notions to the basic contours of his little ethics, we see that they
apply not so much to the face-to-face encounter with the other, par-
ticularly one who knows us well, such as a family member or friend,
as at the more anonymous level of our relations with others. This is
why Ricoeur agrees with John Rawls that justice really is a question
about social relations, not individual or intimate ones (without com-
pletely accepting Rawls's argument for a purely procedural theory of
justice). As he says, 'the other for friendship is the "you"; the other
of justice is "anyone", as is indicated by the Latin adage suum
cucique tribuere (to each his own)' (1, xiii). This shift of focus to the
social plane allows Ricoeur to think more deeply about the stage
that he called practical wisdom in his little ethics, the application of
the aim of the good life and the norms that express it to singular sit-
uations. One conclusion he reaches is that reducing everything to a
question of law, as already stated, is problematic because the law
always seeks to address the general features of a case, not its singu-
larity. The 'you' in question is 'anyone' recognized in relation to a
137
legal institution, as the criminal or the victim, the accused or the
accuser. Therefore we must ask when do justice and the just meet in
the application of the law and the meting out of punishment? Can
they? In a just society, we want them to do so. We also know that
they do not always do so. Death cut off any further answer that
Ricoeur might have added here. It - and he - leaves us 'food for
thought'.
NOTES
1. READING RICOEUR
Ricoeur spoke to me in the year before he died about a new book on
what memory could learn from history, to follow his discussion of what
history learns from memory in Memory, History, Forgetting. He told
others about another project to be titled The Capable Human B e i n ~
2 They had met while Ricoeur was in Prague as part of the unofficial
underground university assisted by western European philosophers,
who met privately with Czech philosophers and students. For an
account of this movement, see Day (l999).
3 See 'From existentialism to the philosophy of language' in RM, 315-22;
'Intellectual autobiography' in LLP, 3-53; C&C.
4 Ricoeur's last public lecture, given when he received the Kluge Prize in
2004, is available at www.loc.gov/loc/kluge/prize/winners.html as both a
webcast and a transcript.
2. FREEDOM AND NATURE
Descartes himself will add that this needs to be further grounded on the
certainty of a demonstration that God exists and that God is not a
deceiver, a point later philosophy often tends to ignore.
2 Today we might question whether a machine might be able to fulfil this
role. Descartes himself would have denied this.
3 It is embodied, lived experience that is the meeting place of these two
forms of discourse (FN, 9-10). See Ricoeur's own later discussion with
a leading French neuroscientist, Jean-Pierre Changeux, in What Makes
Us Think, for a more recent version of his position on this question.
4 'The act of the Cogito is not a pure act of self-positing: it lives on
what it receives and in a dialogue with the conditions in which it
itself is rooted. The act of myself is at the same time participation'
(FN,18).
5 The French language with its use of reflexive verb forms is more explicit
here:je me decide. Later Ricoeur will develop more fully another notion
139
NOTES
that already appears here. In deciding, I impute an action to myself. This
idea of imputation will become a crucial component of his anthropol-
ogy of the capable human being and his ethics.
6 There may be a possible source of anxiety here as well that anticipates
the problem of evil: 'I didn't realize I , what I really meant to do was
to.
7 As Ricoeur acknowledges at the end of this discussion, his method has
already been forced to move beyond pure description: 'All our analyses
- whether they proceed from direct elucidation of concepts, from exege-
sis of revealing metaphors, or from the effort to clarify certain basic
experiences - focus on the same definition of the essence to deciding'
(FN,84).
8 But see here the essay 'True and False Anguish' in HT, 287-304.
9 In light of discussions in French philosophy in the years after the
appearance of this work by Ricoeur about how to think about the pres-
ence of the other in its otherness, it is worth noting that Ricoeur can
already say here in passing that this initial encounter with the question
of imagination already points to the question of the possible pure rep-
resentation of absence (FN, 98-99).
10 See CR, 55-61.
11 An important later essay will return to this theme. See 'Negativity and
Primary Affirmation' in HT, 305-28.
12 Ricoeur will return to the question of the unconscious in his later book
on Freud.
13 The same thing may be said about naming a perspective as a perspective;
this already takes us beyond perspective on this first level.
14 Kant 1961: Al41. Ricoeur goes on to discuss how Kant relates his
idea of the schematism to the question of time, concluding that
Kant was unable finally to show 'a radical genesis of the concept of
understanding and intuition beginning with the transcendental deter-
mination of time' (FM, 43). He will return to this argument in his
last work, The Course of Recognition, and there conclude, as already
noted, that it calls into question the whole approach in terms of
'representation'
15 Ricoeur explicitly discusses and criticizes the development of this doc-
trine in' "Original Sin": A Study in Meaning', in CI, 269-86.
16 Ricoeur bases this claim on his interpretation of HusserI, but also on a
wider ontological interpretation that language is never fully adequate to
being, which can be said in many different ways.
17 'This second naivete aims to be the post-critical equivalent of the pre-
critical hierophany' (SE, 353).
3. RICOEUR'S TURN TO HERMENEUTICS
In one of his replies to an essay in the volume of the Library of Living
Philosophers series dedicated to his work, Ricoeur states that his origi-
nal project could not be completed as originally conceived following
140
NOTES
something like a Jasperian philosophy of Transcendence, but instead
was subsequently divided between a philosophical poetics and Ricoeur's
own attempts at biblical exegesis 'expressly maintained at the frontiers
of philosophy' (Reply to Charles E. Reagan', LLP, 347; see also 'Reply
to Domenico Jervolino', LLP, 544).
2 The relevant texts here are CI, IT, HHS and FTA.
3 In the third volume of Time and Narrative Ricoeur will turn this idea of
reconciliation without consolation into a critique of Hegel, whom he
still draws on here in pursuing his own philosophical interpretation of
Freud.
4 This is one reason Ricoeur will be critical of attempts by later psycho-
analytic theorists to reinterpret Freud and psychoanalytic therapeutic
practice solely in terms of a linguistic model. See, e.g., 'Image and
Language in Psychoanalysis' (1978).
5 See, for example, Ricoeur's 'Fatherhood: From Phantasm to Symbol' in
CI,468-97.
6 For a broader history of structuralism, see Dosse (1997).
7 A first version, edited by C. Bally and A. Sechehay, appeared in 1916.
There are two translations of this work into English: Saussure (1969;
1986).
8 See Levi-Strauss (1969).
9 Levi-Strauss, 'The Structural Study of Myth', in 1963: 206-31;
1969-1981.
10 That we start from a language that is already meaningful to some extent
does not mean that such language may not also contain systematic dis-
tortions regarding what it can say. Here is a tie to Ricoeur's own discus-
sions of ideology and the critique of ideology. For an example of how
he relates this project of a critique of ideology to hermeneutics, see
Ricoeur (1973).
II See PelIauer (2007).
12 The lecture 'Metaphor and Symbol' (IT, 45-69) is a good place to begin
here.
4. THE FULLNESS OF LANGUAGE AND FIGURATIVE DISCOURSE
'Poetry' here means more than rhymed verse. It potentially includes any-
thing made using language as opposed to those things that occur by
nature.
2 See 'The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling'
(Ricoeur 1978c) for this latter development.
3 See, for example, 'The Logic of Jesus, the Logic of God' and' "Whoever
Loses their Life for my Sake wilI Find it" , in Figuring the Sacred. Even
in these sermons Ricoeur does not claim to speak with religious author-
ity but as a philosopher who tries to hear what the text has to say.
4 See, for example, his lectures on the parables in 'Biblical Hermeneutics'
(Ricoeur 1975).
5 See Ricoeur (1986b).
141
NOTES
5. SELFHOOD AND PERSONAL IDENTITY
A further question here, therefore, is whether the ontology of events
found in most action theory really is adequate to making sense of human
action.
2 In passing, Ricoeur also notes here that we tend to talk about this depen-
dence of acts on their agents in terms of metaphors such as fatherhood
and political mastery. He will return to the question in his later works to
consider whether this lingering metaphoricity, which runs through the
whole history of philosophy after Aristotle, and which really only adds
the further metaphors of one being the 'owner' or 'author' of one's acts
to the list, does not point to an important unresolved question insofar
as a philosophy of action seeks to be conceptual rather than metaphor-
ical in what it says.
3 These predicates are meaningful outside the particular case of ascrip-
tion in that they are part of the vocabulary of a culture and their pos-
sible list seems to be one that can expand or contract depending on the
culture in question. It is the semantic autonomy of such mental predi-
cates in relation to particular acts of ascription, Ricoeur says, that
accounts for the shift in focus from the agent to the questions 'what?'
and 'why?'
4 This is where the metaphor of ownership comes into play in relation to
a theory of action.
5 Ricoeur notes that this is a different sense of character than the one he
had drawn on in his earlier book, The Voluntary and Involuntary.
6 Parfit (1987: 255).
7 A key factor here, again from Time and Narrative, is that the events of
the story that mark such turning points are narrative events, ones
linked to and only identifiable through the configuring of the overall
plot.
8 Ricoeur will always argue for a more interactive theory, one where
neither the ego nor the other takes precedence, but also where there
is something singular about the self that is not reducible to intersub-
jective relations. See, for example, his discussion of Husserl and
Levinas at the conclusion of Oneself as Another (322-26 and 331--41)
and his more explicit version in The Course of Recognition (157-61,
260-62).
9 Ricoeur will continue to refine and revise this ethics in his later works.
The introduction to Reflections on the Just gives his final statement on
this topic.
lOIn the introduction to Reflections on the Just Ricoeur says that if he
could start over he would present this theory starting from the middle
term, the idea of moral obligation.
II Ricoeur will continue to work on this idea of being willing to live
together in his later work, particularly in regard to its implications for
political and legal philosophy.
142
NOTES
6. MEMORY, RECOGNITION, PRACTICAL WISDOM
1 See, for example, MHF, 333, for an indication of this connection.
2 This does not exclude consideration of diminished capacity owing to
handicaps or disease. See 'The difference between the normal and the
pathological as a source of respect' (RJ, 187-97).
3 Ricoeur notes but leaves unexplored here that there is also a question
how memory takes up this historical time and reintegrates it into its sym-
bolic universe (see MHF, 161).
4 Historians may, of course, revise or refine their questions on the basis of
the documents they find in the archive.
5 His critique here draws on Lloyd (1990).
6 In this sense, it stands in continuity with his discussion of the iconic
augmentation brought about by metaphor and other forms of figura-
tive discourse, while having its own specificity that distinguishes it from
them.
7 See, for example, T &N, 3: 100.
8 See here, also, MHF, 278.
9 He had already begun to layout this critique of this aspect of
Heidegger's philosophy in the third volume of Time and
T&N,3:60-96).
10 See 'The Nuptial Metaphor' (in LaCocque and Ricoeur 1998:
265-303).
11 There are earlier indications of this emphasis, however, in Oneself as
Another (see OAA, 340-41). These pages show us how Ricoeur situates'
his own position in relation to both Husserl and Emmanuel Levinas.
They come at the question of our relation to others from opposite direc-
tions, Husserl beginning from the ego, Levinas from the other. Ricoeur
wants to accept Levinas's emphasis on the importance of the encounter
with the other, while also acknowledging that there is something funda-
mental about my experience of myself that is not knowable to the others
and not constituted by them.
12 In On Translation (2006), his collection of three short essays on this
topic, Ricoeur expands this idea to call for what he designates as 'lin-
guistic hospitality', echoing Kant's requirement of hospitality in his
essay on perpetual peace.
13 For Ricoeur's position on the question of the nature and status of auth-
ority today, see 'The Paradox of Authority' (RJ, 91-105).
14 His own testimony to the court that finally considered this case appears
as an epilogue to Reflections on the Just (249-56).
15 He disagrees with Rawls that a theory of justice can be formulated as
simply a question of distribution and procedures governing this, with no
attention needing to be paid to the question of what goods are to be dis-
tributed.
16 The essays on medical ethics in Reflections on the Just are striking exam-
ples of how Ricoeur's ethics can begin from a decision applied in some
concrete situation and work back from it to the development of norms
143
NOTES
and the identification of an organizing teleological principle. In this
volume, he acknowledges the importance today of starting from such
'regional ethics' (which also include business ethics and environmental
ethics) for moral philosophy. This idea was not present in his earlier
work.
BIBLIOGRAPHY IFURTHER READING
Ricoeur's own bibliography is extensive, as is the amount of secondary
material, which continues to grow. Here are the books and a few of the arti-
cles by Ricoeur available in English, along with some of the more useful sec-
ondary material for those just coming to his thought. For a more detailed
listing of his works and an extensive listing of secondary literature through
2000, see the bibliography in Hahn (1995) and Vansina (2000).
An important website for future work on Ricoeur is the Ricoeur archive in
Paris: www.fondsricoeur.fr
WORKS BY RICOEUR
History and Truth (1965), trans. Charles Kelbley. Evanston: Northwestern
University Press.
Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary (1966), trans.
Erazim V Kohak. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
The Symbolism of Evil (1967a), trans. Emerson Buchanan. New York:
Harper and Row.
Husser!: An Analysis of His Phenomenology (l967b), trans. Edward G.
Ballard and Lester E. Embree. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (1970), trans. Denis
Savage. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
'Ethics and Culture: Habermas and Gadamer in Dialogue' (1973).
Philosophy Today 17, pp. 153-65.
The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics (1974a). Evanston:
Northwestern University Press.
Political and Social Essays (1974b), ed. David Steward and Joseph Bien.
Athens: Ohio University Press.
'Biblical Hermeneutics' (1975). Semeia 4, pp. 27-148.
Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (1976). Fort
Worth: Texas Christian University Press.
The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of
Meaning in Language (1977), trans. Robert Czerny et al. Toronto and
Buffalo: University of Toronto Press.
145
BIBLIOGRAPHY/FURTHER READING
The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: An Anthology of His Work (l978a), ed.
Charles E. Reagan and David Stewart. Boston: Beacon Press.
'Image and Language in Psychoanalysis' (1978b), in Psychoanalysis and
Language, ed. Joseph H. Smith. New Haven: Yale University Press,
pp. 293-324.
'The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling' (1978c).
CriticalInquiry 5, pp. 143-59.
Essays on Biblical Interpretation (I 980a), ed. Lewis S. Mudge. Philadelphia:
Fortress Press.
The Contribution of French Historiography to the Theory of History (I 980b),
The Zaharoff Lecture for 1978-9. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (1981), ed. and trans. John
B. Thompson. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
The Reality of the Historical Past (1984), The Aquinas Lecture, 1984.
Milwaukee: Marquette University Press.
Time and Narrative (1984--88), 3 vols., trans. Kathleen Blarney and David
Pellauer. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Fallible Man (l986a), trans. Charles Kelbley. New York: Fordham
University Press.
Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (1986b), ed. George H. Taylor. New York:
Columbia University Press.
'The Fragility of Political Language' (1987), trans. David Pellauer.
Philosophy Today 31, pp. 35-44.
Critique and Conviction: Conversations with Fran(:ois Azouvi and Marc de
Launay (1988), trans. Kathleen Blarney. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Reflection and Imagination: A Ricoeur Reader (1991a), ed. Mario 1. Valdes.
Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press.
From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II (1991b), trans. Kathleen
Blarney and John B. Thompson. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Oneself as Another (1993), trans. Kathleen Blarney. Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press.
A Key to Edmund Husserl's Ideas I (1996), trans. Bond Harris et al.
Milwaukee: Marquette University Press.
Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination (1997), ed. Mark
I. Wallace, trans. David Pellauer. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.
The Just (2000), trans. David Pellauer. Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press.
Memory, History, Forgetting (2004), trans. Kathleen Blarney and David
Pellauer. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
The Course oj Recognition (2005), trans. David Pellauer. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.
On Translation (2006), trans. Eileen Brennan. London: Routledge.
Reflections on the Just (2007), trans. David Pellauer. Chicago and London:
Jean-Pierre Changeux and Paul Ricoeur (2000), What Makes Us Think? A
Neuroscientist and a Philosopher Argue about Ethics, Human Nature, and
the Brain, trans. M.B. DeBevoise. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
146
Andre LaCocque and Paul Ricoeur (1998), Thinking Biblically: Exegetical
and Hermeneutical Studies, trans. David Pellauer. Chicago and London:
SECONDARY SOURCES AND AUTHORS CITED
Anderson, Pamela (1993), Ricoeur and Kant: Philosophy of the Will.
Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press.
Anscombe, GE.M. (1957), Intention. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Bakhtin, Mikhail (1984), Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and trans.
Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Benveniste, Emile (1977), Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary
Elizabeth Meek. Coral Gables: University of Miami Press.
Bourgeois, Patrick L. (1975), Extension of Ricoeur's Hermeneutic. The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Bourgeois, Patrick L., and Frank Schalow (1990), Traces of Understanding:
A Profile of Heidegger's and Ricoeur's Hermeneutics. Atlanta: Rodopi.
Braudel, Fernand (1972-74), The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean
World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols., trans. SHin Reynolds. New York:
Harper and Row. .;
Clark, S.H. (1990), Paul Ricoeur. London and New York: Routledge.
Cohen, Richard A. and James I. Marsh, eds. (2002), Ricoeur as
Another: The Ethics of Subjectivity. Albany: State University of New
York Press.
Danto, Arthur (1985), Narration and Knowledge. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Dauenhauer, Bernard P. (1998), Paul Ricoeur: The Promise and Risk of
Politics. 20th Century Political Thinkers. Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield.
Davidson, Donald (1980), Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
Day, Barbara (1999), The Velvet Philosophers. London: The Claridge Press.
Dosse, Franr,:ois (1997), History of Structuralism, 2 vols., trans. Deborah
Glassman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Evans, Jeanne (1995), Paul Ricoeur's Hermeneutics of the Imagination. New
York: Peter Lang.
Fodor, James (1995), Christian Hermeneutics: Paul Ricoeur and the
Refiguring of Theology. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1991), Truth and Method, 2nd revised edition,
trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Crossroad.
Hahn, Lewis Edwin, ed. (1995), The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, The
Library of Living Philosophers, 22. Chicago: Open Court.
Heidegger, Martin (1962), Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and
Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row.
Ihde, Don (1971) Hermeneutic Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Paul
Ricoeur. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Joy, Morny, ed. (1997), Paul Ricoeur and Narrative: Context and
Contestation. Calgary: University of Calgary Press.
147
Junker-Kenny, Maureen, and Peter Kenny, eds. (2004), Memory,
Narrativity, Self and the Challenge to Think God: The Reception within
Theology of the Recent Work of Paul Ricoeur Munster: Lit.
Kant, Immanuel (1961), Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp
Smith. New York: St. Martin's Press.
Kaplan, David (2003), Rieoeur's Critical Theory. Albany: State University
of New York Press.
Kearney, Richard (2004), On Paul Ricoeur: The Owl of Minerva. Burlington,
VT: Ashgate.
Kearney, Richard, ed. (1996), Paul Ricoeur: The Hermeneutics of Action.
London: Sage.
Kermode, Frank (1967), The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of
Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press.
Klemm, David E. (1983), The Hermeneutical Theory of Paul Ricoeur: A
Constructive Analysis. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; London
and Toronto: Associated University Presses.
Klemm, David E., and William Schweiker, eds. (1993), Meanings in Texts
and Actions: Questioning Paul Ricoeur. Charlottesville and London:
University of Virginia Press.
Lawlor, Leonard (1992), Imagination and Chance: The Difference Between
the Thought of Rieoeur and Derrida. Albany: State University of New
York Press.
Levi-Strauss, Claude (1963), Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire
Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoeph. New York: Basic Books.
--(1969), The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. James Harle Bell
and John Richard von Sturmer. Boston: Beacon Press.
-- (1969-1981), Introduction to a Science of Mythology, 4 vols., trans.
John and Doreen Weightman. New York: Harper and Row.
Lloyd, Geoffrey E.R. (1990), Demystifying Mentalities. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Lowe, Walter James (1977), Mystery and the Unconscious: A Study in the
Thought of Paul Rieoeur. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press.
Mann, Thomas (1927), The Magic Mountain. trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter. New
York: Alfred A. Knopf.
McCarthy, John, ed. (1997), The Whole and Divided Self: The Bible and
Theological Anthropology. New York: Crossroad.
MerIeau-Ponty, Maurice (1962), Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin
Smith. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Muldoon, Mark (2002), On Ricoeur. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson
Learning.
--(2006), Tricks of Time: Bergson, Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur in Search
of Time, Self and Meaning. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
Musil, Robert (1995), The Man Without Qualities, 2 vols., trans. Sophie
Wilkens. New York: Knopf.
Nagel, Thomas (1986), The View from Nowhere and Other Essays. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Opdebeeck, Hendrick J., ed. (2000), The Foundation and Application of
Moral Philosophy: Rieoeur's Ethical Order. Leuven: Peeters.
148
Parfit, Derek (1987), Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Pellauer, David (2007), review of Paul Ricoeur, On Translation. Notre Dame
Philosophical Reviews, http://ndpr.nd.edulreview.cfm?id=8783 (accessed
14 February 2007).
Proust, Marcel (1981), Remembrance of Things Past, 3 vols., trans.
C.K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin and Andreas Mayor. New York:
Random House.
Rasmussen, David M. (1971), Mythic-Symbolic Language and Philosophical
Anthropology: A Constructive Interpretation of the Thought of Paul
Ricoeur. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Rawls, John (1999), A Theory of Justice, revised edition. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.
Reagan, Charles E. (1996), Paul Ricoeur: His Life and Work. Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press.
Reagan, Charles E., ed. (1979), Studies in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur.
Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.
Ritivoi, Andreea Deciu (2006), Paul Ricoeur: Tradition and Innovation in
Rhetorical Theory. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Saussure, Ferdinand de (1969), Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade
Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill.
--(1986), Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris. Chicago: Open
Court.
Simms, Karl (2003), Paul Ricoeur. London and New York: Routledge.
Stiver, Dan R. (2001), Theology After Ricoeur: New Directions in
Hermeneutical Theology. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press.
Strawson, p.F. (1959), Individuals. London: Methuen.
Thompson, John B. (1991), Critical Hermeneutics: A Study in the Thought
of Paul Ricoeur and Jilrgen Habermas. Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Van den Hengel, John W, S.C.I (1982), The Home of Meaning: The
Hermeneutics of the Subject of Paul Ricoeur. Lanham, MD: University
Press of America.
Vanhoozer, Kevin I (1990), Biblical Narrative in the Philosophy of Paul
Ricoeur: A Study in Hermeneutics and Theology. Cambridge and New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Van Leeuwen, T.M. (1981), The Surplus of Meaning: Ontology and
Eschatology in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Vansina, F.D. (2000), Paul Ricoeur: Bibliography 1935-2000. Leuven:
Peeters.
Venema, Henry (2000), Identifying Seljhood: Imagination, Narrative, and
Hermeneutics in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur. Albany: State University of
New York Press.
Wall, John (2005), Moral Creativity: Paul Ricoeur and the Poetics of
Possibility. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Wall, John, William Schweiker and W David Hall, eds. (2002), Paul Ricoeur
and Contemporary Moral Thought. London and New York: Routledge.
Wallace, Mark I. (1990), The Second Naivete: Barth, Ricoeur, and the New
Yale Theology. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press.
149
BIBLIOGRAPHY IFURTHER READING
White, Hayden (1973), Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in
Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press.
Wiercinski, Andrezej, ed. (2003), Between Suspicion and Sympathy: Paul
Ricoeur's Unstable Equilibrium. Toronto: The Hermeneutic Press.
Wood, David, ed. (1991), On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation.
London and New York: Routledge.
Woolf, Virginia (1924), Mrs Dalloway. London: Hogarth Press.
INDEX
Anscombe, G. E. M.
Aquinas, Thomas 33
Aristotle 67-8, 70, 71,97,102-3,
110,129,134
ascription 93, 97-9,102, 106, 113,
142n. 3
attestation 92, 96-7,99,105-7,115,
129
Augustine 12, 71
Austin, 1. L. 94
Bakhtin, Mikhail 79
Benveniste, Emile 58-9
Body, embodiment 5, 8, 14, 16,
19-22,31,39,93,97, 108,
124
Braudel, Fernand 74
capable human being 6,7, 14,27,
90,91,96,106, 109, Ill, 129,
130
cogito 6-7, 12, 13, 18,21,41,46,
47, 52,90-1, 108, 120 see also
subject-object model
shattered 91
conviction 15,47, 105-6, 117,
119
Danto, Arthur 75
Davidson, Donald 95
151
death 9,24,48,50,123--4,126, 130,
138
Derrida, Jacques 70
Descartes, Rene 6-8, 10, 12,27,33,
46,91-2,128
Dilthey, Wilhelm 66
discourse 51-2, 54, 58-67,70,85,
92,95,112,122,126,129
conceptual 70
event 61
extended 62-3, 67, 71, 72, 78
figurative 62, 64, 66, 70
Freudian 44, 52
inscribed 60
metaphorical 59, 68
narrative 2, 6, 59, 70-3, 78, 82-5,
109
philosophical 70,85,91
poetic 67, 70, 87
political 85, 88-9
rational 26, 29, 70
religious 85-8
speculative 70
symbolic 66
Dufrenne, Mikel 3, 9
ethics 6, 47, 83--4,90, 98,99,
102-3, 105-6, 109, 113,
120, 124, 126-7, 134,
136-7
INDEX
Event 10,60, 14--6, 81-2, 92, 95-6,
101,115-16
action 20
decision 5, 15, 19
discourse 60-1, 92
founding 81
historical 74, 110
mythic 38
narrative 73-5, 101, 118-19,
142n. 7
natural 5
ontology 142 n. 1
political 80
thinking 121
evil 13, 17, 19,22,24--6.32-4,
36-40,45,55,104,121,125-6,
134 see also fault
mora1125
radical 32
existentialism 8, 15, 19,24,39,41,
83, 120--3
explanation 12, 16,34,48,50-1,
66,68,15-6,78,95,96,117,
ll8, 119, 131
fallibility 26, 28, 32-3
fault 17, 19,25-6,28,33-9,41,71,
125,135
feeling 16,27,28,31,32,36-7,49,
69,98
fiction 69, 72, 73, 75, 77-82, 92, 99,
1I0,117-18
forgetting 47, 109, llO, 120, 124--6,
133
forgiveness 120, 125-6
Freud, Sigmund 26, 42-55, 83, 110,
119, 123
friendship 100, 103, 133,
137
Gadamer, Hans-Georg 61
gift 40, 123, 126, 132-3
Gilson, Etienne 90
Havel, Vaclav 3
Hegel, G. W F. 14,27,51,53,55,
83,84,85, 121, 130--2
Heidegger, Martin 6, 8-9,24, 73,
107,112,122-4
hermeneutics 9, 32,41,42,43,46,
48,50--159-60,62,64,66,83
85,88, 1I7, 120, 122
circle 54, 88
consciousness 51
historical existence 123
Freud 48-9, 55
historical consciousness 83
language 62
ontology 70
phenomenology 64, 70
philosophy 41, 47,50--1,57,120
self 91, 107
suspicion 46, 47, 53, 58, 78, 85,
llO
symbols 45, 62
text 78
understanding 57,62,65,66
historiographical operation
ll4--15, ll7-19, 122
history 38, 39, 50, 57, 66, 67, 71,
72-8,80,82,99,109-10,
112-15,117-24,126,130
distance 60
152
explanation 76
fact 116, 122
hermeneutics 65-6
hope 83
mentalities 114, 117
microhistory 114
narrative 77, 79-80,118
reception 61, 83
representation 118-19
text 76,82,83, 114
time 71-2, 80-2, 115, 121
truth 78
Hobbes, Thomas 130
hope 23-4,83,87,126, 133
INDEX
Hume, David 100
Husser!, Edmund 10-12, 27, 64-5
identity 99-100,113, II7,128
communal 82,88, 113, 126
idem 99, 100, 107
ipse 90, 99, 100, 101, 107
narrative 82-488-90,99-101,103
personal 8,90,91,96,99, 100,
109, 112,126,129
politics of 126-7, 131
ideology 88-9, 125, 141n. 10
imagination 17,18,20,21,27,30,
35, 83-4,89, 110, 117
poetic 35, 45
imputation 38, 96, 98,102, 107,
129-30, 140n. 5
Jacobson, Roman 56
Jaspers, Karl 6, 8, 9, 13
just,justice 36,38,83,89,96,98,
103-6,109,113,118,120,121,
126,133
distance 133, 135, 136-8
Kant, Immanuel 9, 10,27,28,30,
31-2, 33,41,47,55,57, 101,
105-6, 128, 134
Kermode, Frank 73
Kierkegaard, Sf2Iren 8
Lacan, Jacques 44
language 10, 15, 16,21,26,29,34,
35-6,38,41,43-6,48,51,52,
55-6,58,60,62,63,66-7,70,
72-3,75,79-80,85,92-3,107,
Ill, II3, 126-7, 130 see also
discourse
figurative 26, 62, 70
fullness 35,40, 58, 62, 63, 65, 66,
71,86
myth 35, 38
optative 126
poetic 84,88
political 88-9
philosophical 126
religious 86
symbolic 26,35,41,46,55
Levi-Strauss, Claude 56-7
Levinas, Emmanuel 102, 142 n. 8,
143 n. II
Locke, John 100
logic
action sentence 98
equivalence 87
formal 35, 62
reciprocity 132
superabundance 87
symbolic 45,66-7
love 30, 32, 50, 52, 126, 131-3
Mann, Thomas 79
Marcel, Gabriel 6, 8, 9, 10, 13,22,
102
Maritain, Jacques 85
Marx, Kar! 46, 110
memory 100, 109-16, II9-20,
123-7
153
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 15, 65,
122
metaphor 16, 38, 59, 63, 67-70, 77,
78,86, 140n. 7, 142n. 2, 142n.
4
Musil, Robert 101
myth 26, 30, 33-5, 38-43,46, 48,
51,55,57,59,70-1,82,84,
126
time 81
Nabert, Jean 102
narrative 2,6,39,57,59, 70-88, 99,
101-2, 116, 118
discourse 2, 6, 59, 70-3, 78,
82-5, 109
identity 82-4 88-90, 99-101, 103
narratology 78
INDEX
narrative (cont.)
point of view 79
understanding 83, III
voice 75, 79
Nietzsche, Friedrich 24, 46, 70, 91,
110,120
ontology 19, 70, 91, 96,101,108,
110, 120, 123-4, 142n. 1
otherness 30-1, 91-2, 94, 106--8,
113, 133, 140n. 9
Partit, Derek 100-1
Pascal, Blaise 28
Paul, Saint. 38
Plato 28, 33, 59, 115
phenomenology 5, 10-11, 13, 16,
18,21,43,51-3,64-5,70,76,
111,129-30
philosophy
analytic 43, 62, 67,91,92
autonomy 3, 5-6, 65
Christian 85
hermeneutic 47,57, 120
limits 14, 65,85, 108
non-philosophical1, 6, 58, 85,
108
political 134
presuppositions 40, 58
reflective 43-6
phronesis 103 see also wisdom
promise 20,94,100, 102, 125, 130,
136
Proust, Marcel 79, 80, 82, 129
Rawls, John 134, 136-7
reading 60-1, 79, 83, 87
recognition 50, 53, 123, 126-33
demand for 128
gift 132
mutual 33, 103, 126, 127, 128,
130, 131, 132, 133, 135
reciprocal 103, 127, 131
154
self 105, 129, 130
struggle 131-2
responsibility 5, 8, 13, 16,36-7,
40,41,90,92,98-9,102,106,
107, 109, 113, 124, 129, 130,
135
sameness 99-100
Saussure, Ferdinand de 55-6, 58
Searle, John 94
self, selfhood 7, 8, 14,23,31-4,35,
46--7,53,84,57,89,90-2,95,
98-108,112-13,129,131,
137
constancy 100, 102
esteem 103-4, 106
hermeneutics of 91
identity 96, 129
recognition 105, 129-30
respect 103-4, 106
responsible 106, 129
understanding 40,44,84, 107,
120
semantic innovation 66--7, 69, 72
Shakespeare, William 68, 82
solicitude 103-6
Sophocles 129
Spinoza, Baruch 107
Strawson, P. F. 93
structuralism 43,44,55-61,64,65,
66,67,71,74,78
subject-object model 6--12, 15, 18,
21,23,32,46,47,52,57,64-5,
84,89-91,93,94, 102, 103 see
also cogito
surplus of meaning 54,63,65, 119,
133
symbol 26, 33-43,45,46,47,49,
51-2,54-5,57,62,6366,71,
126, 130, 132-3
testimony 47,92, 105, 115-19, 121,
129
INDEX
text 60-1, 65, 83
foundational 88
genre 61
hermeneutics 78
history 75-6,82, II4
style 61
world of 61, 77, 79, 83
time 5, 15, 18,24,38,56-7,60,67,
68-9,71-84,90,92,96,
99-102, 107, 110, 112-15, 118,
120-2, 124, 128-9, 132
historical 71-2, 80-2, 115, 121
human 71, 73, 80--1
mythic 81
tragedy 3, 38,39, 77, 105
Transcendence 9, 12, 13, 25, 28, 35,
41,71,121, 141n. 1
155
understanding 12, 16,38,41,
48,54,58,61,66,73,
76, II7, 119
finite 65
hermeneutic 57, 62, 65
narrative 74,76-7,83,
11I
utopia 88-9
veracity 96, Ill, 114
Weber, Max 134, 137
White, Hayden 76
wisdom 22, 50, 87
practical 103, 105-6, 124,
136-7
Woolf, Virginia 79

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