This can be seen through a phenomenological description of the three structures that constitute the voluntary: There is no seamless harmony between these dimensions of what is finally only a finite freedom. Human beings have to struggle with the tension between them and ultimately to consent to their embodied lives and the world as something they do not fully create.
It is the always fragile resolution of this conflict that ultimately makes human freedom genuinely human, and that gives us our distinctive identities both as individuals and as members of larger historical communities and ultimately of humanity. Ricoeur extends his account of freedom to take up the problem of evil in Fallible Man and The Symbolism of Evil, both published in In these works he addresses the question of how to account for the fact that it is possible for us to misuse our freedom, the reality of a bad will, a question that had been bracketed in the initial phenomenological volume.
In Fallible Man he argues through a transcendental analysis that this possibility is grounded in the basic disproportion that characterizes human existence as located between the finite, perspectival nature of experience and the infinite, rational dimensions of taking up that experience in perception, practice, and feeling, leading to the concept of fallibility. This disproportion shows up in every aspect of human existence, from perceiving to feeling to thinking. It is evident in the human quest for possessions, power, and prestige. By reason of this disproportion, we are never wholly at one with ourselves and hence we can go wrong.
We are fallible, yet evil, the misuse of our freedom, is neither original nor necessary, only always possible. Nor does this disproportion render our existence meaningless. Rather, the very disproportion that makes us fallible and makes human evil possible is also what makes goodness, knowledge, and achievement possible. It is what distinguishes us from one another—each one of us has his or her unique spatiotemporal location and perspective but can we can know ourselves as one human among many and we can know the world beyond our individual perspective on it.
At the same time our fallibility makes it possible for us to communicate with each other through our use of the logos which seeks to transcend our localized points of view. Though the unity of humanity is never more than a unity founded on communication, precisely because we can communicate, the differences among us are never absolute.
Furthermore, no one of us alone could be a person. Though each of us has an individual identity, our identities show that we are bound up with others: The kind of unity that binds people to one another even though they differ is found in their quest for esteem and recognition. This quest aims for genuine mutuality that expresses a mutual esteem for the worth that each of us has by reason of both our common humanity and our individual uniqueness. This esteem positively values the disproportion constitutive of every person. Both our constitutive disproportion and our quest for mutual esteem are also visible through the study of history which acknowledges the temporality of our existence.
And such attention to history, in turn, further clarifies the finite nature of human freedom. For Ricoeur, there is an order and structure to history conveyed through the narrating of history. Otherwise history would be unintelligible. But this narrated history also recounts events and deeds that disrupt the prevailing order and reorder it, leading to the question whether forgiveness for the wrongs that have occurred and debts that have been incurred might be possible, however difficult to achieve.
What we say and do would be meaningless if it did not fit into some antecedent structure or pattern established by natural processes, on the one hand, and into what we say about such doings which intervene in those processes, on the other. Our words and deeds are intended to express the meaning of what exists, if only because they give meaning to things as they now stand.
In this sense, our words and deeds get their significance from being responses to contexts not wholly of our own making. What we say and do in such contexts can also aim beyond things as they now stand and sometimes does give expression to new meanings and values, as well as to unintended and as yet unrealized possibilities.
In a word, our exercising of our finite freedom has worth and efficacy only by reason of our embodiment in a natural and cultural setting that is largely not of our own making, but this is a world that we seek to appropriate through our words and deeds—and our use of a productive imagination. Ricoeur saw that this conception of the disproportion that characterizes human beings was insufficient to account for actual occurrence of a bad will and evil deeds.
No direct, unmediated inspection of the cogito, as Descartes and Husserl had proposed, can show why these evils, contingent as each of them is, in fact came to be. Ricoeur next explored the problem of how then to account for the existence of evil in The Symbolism of Evil.
There, he argued that we have to consider how people have tried to come to terms with their inability to make sense of the existence of evil by using language that draws on the great symbols and myths that speak of its origin and end. This is language that conveys more than a single meaning, language that can always be understood in more than one way; hence it needs always to be interpreted.
This study concluded by saying that philosophy must learn to make sense of such language and learn to think starting from it, something Ricoeur summed up in a famous phrase: This means considering those uses of language that extend beyond a single word or sentence, as well as those which cannot be reduced logical propositions. Like symbols these are forms of discourse that may have more than one meaning. To make sense of the fullness of language, therefore, philosophy has to develop a theory of interpretation since actual discourse is not always, if ever univocal and its meanings do change over time when discourse outlives the speakers and situations in which it was originally produced.
In working out this theory of interpretation in terms of a theory of language as discourse, Ricoeur saw that what he now called the hermeneutic field was itself divided internally between an approach such as that used in The Symbolism of Evil which sought to recover meaning that was assumed to be already there and what he now called a hermeneutics of suspicion, like that found in Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, which held that nothing ultimately means what it first seems to say.
The rise of structuralism in the s and 70s, drawing on developments in linguistics, contributed to this emphasis on suspicion by holding that it was an underlying structure or structures that gave rise to the apparent surface meaning. Structuralism also introduced the idea that the identifying of such underlying structures could count as a reductive explanation of any surface-level meaning.
Over time, he came to see that this limiting of structural analysis to a method of interpretation can be shown to follow from the fact that structuralists always presupposed the surface meaning they were trying to explain away. Moreover, because they ignored time and discarded any notion of change, because the deep structures they discovered were understood to be static and atemporal, they could not really account for how structures generated surface meanings, that is, how one structure could change into a different structure.
1. Biographical Sketch
This is an approach through which he seeks to find the middle term that can mediate between two polar terms and allow us to move back and forth between them. Locating such a mediating term leads to enhanced understanding. It always comes about through interpretation but is also itself open to critique. In other words, it is a method that mediates and negotiates rather than removes the conflict of interpretations.
Besides recognizing the fruitfulness of structural analyses of particular well-defined fields of experience, Ricoeur resisted those structuralists who sought to reduce language itself to a closed system of signs having no reference to anything outside itself. Following clues found in the works of Emile Benveniste and Roman Jakobson, he defined discourse as the use of such sign systems by someone to say something about something to someone, using existing but malleable phonetic, lexical, syntactic, and stylistic rules.
That is, discourse always involves a speaker or writer and a hearer or reader as well as something said in some situation about some reality, ultimately a world that we might inhabit. It follows that any interpretation of a form of discourse requires both the objective sort of analysis for which structuralism provides a tool and an acknowledgment that there is always a surplus of meaning that goes beyond what such objective techniques seek to explain. There is a surplus of meaning because we apply objective techniques to things we already understand as having a possible meaning without fully exhausting that meaning.
Paul Ricoeur
The meaning of acts of discourse is moreover always open to new interpretations, particularly as time passes and the very context in which interpretation occurs itself changes. On one level, he explored the practice of methods of interpretation as an arc leading from an initial situation and understanding to broadened understanding, both of the interpreter and the world as a world we can imagine ourselves as inhabiting.
On a second level, he explored the broader notion of the fullness of language through investigation of different forms of extended discourse. These are uses of language that are longer than the single sentence and whose truth and meaning is not simply reducible to the sum of the truth values of the individual sentences which constitute such extended discourse. On the basis of these two interwoven levels, he could also take up the questions of selfhood and responsible human action, allowing him in turn to spell out in greater detail the ethical theory that had always been implicit in his philosophy.
This discussion of ethics started from a focus on person to person relations, the self and just one or only a few nearby others, and subsequently moved on to the question of justice and living with others beyond those one may meet every day or face to face. In those final years, he also continued to explore other dimensions of the fullness of language, for example, through some significant essays on the notion of translation as occurring not just between languages but also within them On Translation , His approach was rather to connect his theory of discourse as a use of language meant to say something to someone with examples of such discourse and their interpretation.
But language as spoken is ephemeral, it disappears. The event of speaking might disappear but the text remains for anyone who knows how to read. Structuralism was correct that texts have a structure. But this structure varies depending on the kind of discourse inscribed in the text, so discerning that structure and how it contributes to shaping that discourse helps one identify the discourse as being of a certain type or genre. This is a world that we can think of ourselves as inhabiting.
- Paul Ricoeur and the Task of Political Philosophy (Electronic book text).
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Interpretations, of course, need to be checked against and challenged by other interpretations and they will sooner or later need to be redone as situations change over time. So there is a possibility of both internal and external critique: Explanatory techniques also play a role, particularly when understanding breaks down. In a nice turn of phrase, Ricoeur liked to say one seeks to explain more in order to understand better.
He agreed with Gadamer, moreover, that the goal of interpretation was to enable us to make sense of our embodied existence with others including our predecessors and successors in the world. Ricoeur did not produce a general theory of interpretation. His reflections on hermeneutics were themselves an instance of the philosophical practice of interpretation leading to insight into what ultimately underlies and enables such activity: Ricoeur examined a number of different forms of extended discourse, beginning with metaphorical discourse.
Like the talk about symbols he had explored earlier a live metaphor is a kind of discourse that says more than one thing at the same time. Live metaphors are the product of sentences, not the result of substituting one word for another for decorative or rhetorical effect.
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As creative instances of the use of language, live metaphors can die and be absorbed into the dictionary a watch runs. Live metaphors can also extend beyond a single sentence as in the case of poetic language. Poetic language is thus language that redescribes reality. Its truth is more a matter of manifestation than of coherence or correspondence with what is assumed to be external reality. In an important sense, this experienced truth is the basis for talk about coherence and correspondence, yet paradoxically metaphorical discourse always presupposes an already existing language that it can make use of.
In this sense, we are never at the origin of language. We can question back toward this origin but never reach it, since we always must begin by making use of existing language to question language. Philosophers of the fullness of language therefore always begin as having already begun. Narrative discourse is another form of extended discourse investigated by Ricoeur. It is a use language that allows us to make practical sense of human action and time. Ordinary language already contains concepts that apply to action—those of intentions, motives, causes, reasons, acts, consequences, agents and patients, for example—just as it contains concepts applicable to time: Narrative discourse configures such heterogeneous concepts into a discourse that locates actions in a time where one thing happens not just after something else but because of something else in a followable story or history.
It refigures physical events as narrative events, events which make sense because they tell what happens in a story or history. But because narratives have endings or must end, they never fully exhaust time or the possible long-term meaning of action.
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Through their plots they are always a synthesis of heterogeneous concepts into a kind of discordant concordance which configures the episodes of the story into a told story. In so doing they resolve practically if not theoretically the conflict between time understood as a lived now—this present which has a past and a future—and cosmic time conceived of as a sequence of points, where any point can be a now point defined not in terms of its past and future but merely in terms of points that come before and after it.
Narrative interweaves these two perspectives on time into human time without ever fully resolving the aporias raised by thinking about time in time. Religious discourse, at least as found in the Hebrew and Christian biblical tradition takes many forms: Within their setting within the biblical canon they do so furthermore through their constituting a polyphony that enables the religious traditions that use these texts both to identify and to legitimate themselves through a kind of hermeneutic circle.
That is, such texts are sacred to traditions which take them as legitimating the tradition founded on these texts, something discovered through their reading and interpreting of such texts. Second, issues in political philosophy are often best approached by a historical and dialectical understanding of those issues along with the thinkers responsible for the ideas. As such, Ricoeur's hermeneutical orientation moves him to engage contemporaries who in various ways attempt to "think forward" in various ways this tradition for current situations. In particular, Ricoeur goes where others dare not-namely, to those who appear to be opponents but offer perspectives worth more consideration in the name of the best political thinking.
Thus, his hermeneutical orientation is a unique framework for understanding the nature of political engagement, highlighting the ways in which Ricoeur and a Ricoeurian perspective cross philosophical orientations to develop a distinctive understanding of political thought. This book discusses the political philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. More precisely, it offers a sustained engagement with Ricoeur s political thought in a way that demonstrates both the significance of the political in his own thinking throughout his career, and how Ricoeur s understanding of the political offers something valuable to current discussions in political philosophy.
A second goal is to begin to fill a gap in Ricoeur studies and situate his work on political ethics more fully in contemporary discussions about political thought.
Paul Ricœur and the task of political philosophy
In this way, Ricoeur can be seen as a figure pertinent to recent trends in political philosophy that make political thinking more realistic to the conditions for political life. The various essays in the book move along intersecting but different trajectories. First, as some of these essays attest, the concept of the political is a pervasive theme that runs throughout Ricoeur s corpus. In this way a theme throughout the book examines this notion of the political, as well as how it relates to his more well-known work in other areas.
Second, and related, the historical understanding of perennial issues in political philosophy are most often updated by those standing in the lineage of those who have come before. As such, Ricoeur s hermeneutical orientation has moved him to engage contemporaries who attempt to think forward in various ways this tradition for current situations.
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Paul Ricoeur (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
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Find a copy in the library Finding libraries that hold this item Publisher Synopsis These essays highlight the potential of this philosophy to take up today's political questions, as well as with long-standing political questions which characterize political thought. User-contributed reviews Add a review and share your thoughts with other readers.
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