(In History and Truth, Paul Ricoeur investigates the antin...)
In History and Truth, Paul Ricoeur investigates the antinomy between history and truth, or between historicity and meaning. He argues that history has meaning insofar as it approaches universality and system, but has no meaning insofar as this universality violates the singularity of individuals' lives. Imposing unity upon truth, or unifying the diversity of knowledge and opinion, creates a singular and universal history but destroys historicity and subjectivity. Allowing for singularities in history promotes a multiplicity of truths over a single, unique truth, and thereby annihilates system.
Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary
(This volume, the first part of Paul Ricoeur's Philosophy ...)
This volume, the first part of Paul Ricoeur's Philosophy of the Will, is an eidetics, carried out within carefully imposed phenomenological brackets. It seeks to deal with the essential structure of man's being in the world, and so it suspends the distorting dimensions of existence, the bondage of passion, and the vision of innocence, to which Ricoeur returns in his later writings. The result is a conception of man as an incarnate Cogito, which can make the polar unity of subject and object intelligible and provide a basic continuity for the various aspects of inquiry into man's being-in-the-world.
(Paul Ricoeur has been hailed as one of the most important...)
Paul Ricoeur has been hailed as one of the most important thinkers of the century. Oneself as Another, the clearest account of his "philosophical ethics," substantiates this position and lays the groundwork for a metaphysics of morals. Focusing on the concept of personal identity, Ricoeur develops a hermeneutics of the self that charts its epistemological path and ontological status.
Paul Ricoeur was a French philosopher best known for combining phenomenological description with hermeneutic interpretation. For this reason, he is often associated with two other major hermeneutic phenomenologists, Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Ricoeur published a large body of work on a variety of philosophical subjects, including anthropology, ontology, linguistics, psychology, theology, poetics, ethics, and politics.
Background
Jean Paul Gustave Ricoeur was born on February 27, 1913, in Valence, France, the son of Jules and Florentine Favre Ricoeur.
His parents died when he was only two years old, and he was raised by an aunt and his paternal grandparents.
Education
Ricoeur graduated from the University of Rennes in 1932 and was engaged in graduate studies of philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, receiving master's (1935) and doctoral (1950) degrees there.
Paul Ricoeur taught at the University of Strasbourg (1948-1957) and the University of Paris-X, Nanterre, beginning in 1957; from 1971 to 1985 he was the John Nuveen Professor of the History of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. He won the Balzan Prize for Philosophy in 1999, the John W. Kluge Prize in 2004 as well as the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy in 2000. Ricoeur held numerous honorary degrees from universities around the world. In addition to his own writing, he was editor of the collection Éditions du Seuil, the editor of Revue de Métaphysique et Morale, and a member of the Institut International de Philosophie.
Ricoeur tried to mediate between the conflicting interpretations offered by phenomenology and such contemporary movements as structuralism and post-structuralism, hermeneutics, and semiotics. He focused on language and the interpretation of meaning, emphasizing the idea that Freudian, Marxist, and other interpretative traditions involve a dialectic of both negative and positive assumptions and expectations. He also tried to relate modern traditions of linguistic and critical analysis to various precursor movements in the history of Jewish and Christian biblical exegesis, an effort that gives much of his writing a theological cast.
Ricoeur's principal writings included Le Volontaire et l'involontaire (1950; Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary), which is the first volume in Philosophie de la volonté, 3 vol. (1950-1960; Philosophy of the Will); Histoire et vérité (1955; History and Truth); Le Conflit des interprétations: essais d'herméneutique (1969; The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics); Temps et récit, 3 vol. (1983-1985; Time and Narrative); and Soi-même comme un autre (1990; Oneself as Another).
Paul Ricoeur was at the same time firmly committed to what he called "biblical faith" and to an avowed "agnosticism" in philosophy. Although he was willing to engage the two disciplines or discourses with each other to different degrees at various points of his career, most of the time he kept them rigorously separate.
Politics
While Ricoeur generally stayed out of party politics, he understood the importance of ideology. It was to him both unhelpful and necessary; it distorted reality while also providing the impetus for social reform: "At its three levels - distortion, legitimation, symbolization - ideology has one fundamental function: to pattern, to consolidate, to provide order to the course of action," he wrote.
Ricoeur was a socialist. As a young man, he took part in the Popular Front marches in 1936. He supported the Popular Front government's decision to join Britain in trying to negotiate with Hitler. But he did so with a heavy heart because he felt a strong sense of international solidarity with the people of Czechoslovakia who had just been invaded by Nazi Germany.
Views
Ricoeur's philosophy has often been referred to as "philosophical anthropology." Although he was well-grounded in the entire history of philosophy, his primary resources came from the philosophical tradition known as "continental." This tradition emphasizes the reflective aspect of philosophy and the centrality of the knowing subject. It has its roots in Descartes and moves through Kant and Hegel and finds its more contemporary manifestation in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. Indeed, all of these figures were important influences on Ricoeur, and he maintained certain features of their thinking while coming to develop his own philosophical approach called hermeneutics, which is closely associated with the thought of Heidegger and Gadamer.
Like Descartes, Ricoeur viewed philosophy as being a primarily reflective discipline. Unlike Descartes, however, he sought to situate the reflective, knowing subject not in some disconnected cogito, but in a "self" very much embodied and thus as a concrete existential subject situated in the world. In this respect, Ricoeur was largely indebted to his teacher at the Sorbonne, Gabriel Marcel. Ricoeur’s first book was on Marcel and another existential thinker, Karl Jaspers. Both Marcel and Jaspers were critical of a philosophical idealism in which abstract systems lost contact with the lived experience of concrete human reality. For this reason, they emphasized the situational aspect of human knowing by insisting on the role of the body in its relation to self and others. Ricoeur, likewise, argued that the self is not a free-floating soul or mind which while dwelling inside a body is essentially distinct from it (as Descartes had argued). Rather, the body is an integral part of the self, which means the body plays an important and limiting role in our capacity to know ourselves. It is this search for self-knowledge and the personal question of "Who am I?" that motivated Ricouer in his development of philosophical anthropology. And yet, although Ricoeur was sympathetic to this Socratic aspect of Marcel in seeking self-knowledge, he was dissatisfied with the lack of method in Marcel's philosophical approach. For this reason, he turned to the phenomenology of Husserl, which Ricoeur held to be more methodologically rigorous. Although Ricoeur would become dissatisfied with the purely "eidetic" or structural phenomenology of Husserl, phenomenology would remain Ricoeur's primary philosophical method, though he would engage it with other scientific and philosophical methods as well.
Another key aspect of Ricoeur's philosophy is that like Kant he thought that all human knowledge was essentially finite or limited. We can never attain a pure knowledge of things as they are "in-themselves;" instead, all our knowledge is limited due to certain conditions. Although holding to the finitude of our knowledge, Ricoeur, unlike some postmodern relativists, was not skeptical about the validity or truth of our knowledge. That is, he thought we really do attain truth about ourselves and the world in which we live, and so for this reason we attain "true knowledge." But because such knowledge is always conditioned by various factors, such as the influences of history, culture, and language, this knowledge is not absolute. Unlike Hegel, then, Ricoeur did not hold to the possibility of an "absolute knowledge" where the philosopher hopes to achieve some Universal knowledge of reality or Being. Nevertheless, Ricoeur did practice a kind of dialectic in which various philosophical ideas or methods were brought into dialogue and held in a kind of creative tension. In bringing different scientific or philosophical methods or ideas into dialogue, new conceptual syntheses were created. These syntheses, however, did not claim to contain or encompass entirely the ideas or poles of the tension (as in Hegel's Universal Dialectic). Instead, there emerged a play of ideas in which new meanings are revealed within the scope of their own limited horizons.
Although Ricoeur initially favored the structural or "eidetic" phenomenology of Husserl, which through concrete descriptive analyses tries to attain the "essences" of things, this dialectic between different methods led him to a more hermeneutic philosophy. Hermeneutics as a discipline derives from the interpretation of texts (often sacred ones, such as the Bible). In a philosophical hermeneutics, however, the notion of "text" is opened up to include the entire world. This world or reality is better understood not as a "thing" whose essence I can know directly, but rather as a text that is full of symbols. These symbols contain a wealth or surplus of meaning. In reading the text of the world, a reader/thinker is able to draw from the wealth of this surplus of meaning but never fully exhaust it. This is due to both the richness of reality and the limitations of our modes and means of human knowing. This "hermeneutic turn" of Ricoeur led him to emphasize the role of language as the medium by which we come to know both ourselves and the world around us. Again, though, there are different languages we speak and through which we know. This is true not only of different cultural languages, which have histories of their own and so influence how and what we know. But there are also the different languages of the natural sciences, the human sciences, different philosophical systems, and the language of poetry and art, not to mention the language of everyday discourse. These different languages need to be in dialogue with one another, but again for Ricoeur, there is no "meta-language" which can contain all the different genres of human understanding. For this reason, Ricoeur's philosophy, like that of Heidegger and Gadamer, came to be called a "hermeneutics of finitude."
Quotations:
"But myth is something else than an explanation of the world, of history, and of destiny."
"For my own part, I abandon the ethics of duty to the Hegelian critique with no regrets; it would appear to me, indeed, to have been correctly characterized by Hegel as an abstract thought, as a thought of understanding."
"If it is true that there is always more than one way of construing a text, it is not true that all interpretations are equal."
"It is always possible to argue against an interpretation, to confront interpretations, to arbitrate between them and to seek for an agreement, even if this agreement remains beyond our reach."
"Man is this plural and collective unity in which the unity of destination and the differences of destinies are to be understood through each other."
"Myth expresses in terms of the world - that is, of the other world or the second world - the understanding that man has of himself in relation to the foundation and the limit of his existence."
"Narrative identity takes part in the story's movement, in the dialectic between order and disorder."
"On a cosmic scale, our life is insignificant, yet this brief period when we appear in the world is the time in which all meaningful questions arise."
"Ordinary language carries with it conditions of meaning which it is easy to recognize by classifying the contexts in which the expression is employed in a meaningful manner."
"So long as the New Testament served to decipher the Old, it was taken as an absolute norm."
"Testimony demands to be interpreted because of the dialectic of meaning and event that traverses it."
"Testimony gives something to be interpreted."
Interests
Reading
Connections
On 14 August 1935, Paul Ricoeur married Simone Lejas (23 October 1911-7 January 1998). The couple had five children: Jean-Paul (born 15 January 1937), Marc (born 22 February 1938), Noëlle (born 30 November 1940), Olivier (10 July 1947-22 March 1986), and Etienne (born 1953).