Paul Ricoeur

Paul Ricoeur was among the most impressive philosophers of the 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.

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.

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.
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.