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