PHILOSOPHY

The importance of Paul Ricoeur: an introduction

Chaired by Victor Suchar

Dr Alison Scott-Baumann

University of Gloucester

1 March 2005

Introduction

Paul Ricoeur, born in France in 1913 and still alive at the time of writing, is one of the greatest philosophers of the western world with a wide range of philosophical interests, including theology, literary theory, psychoanalysis, political theory, historiography and law. He has a good following in America, and a revived reputation in France since the 1990s. Yet he is little read in Britain, and is more likely to be encountered either relegated to a footnote or lumped in with Heidegger, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, whose works are different from each other’s, and most decidedly different from Ricoeur’s. His work is characterised by consistent features that can be traced in his early work and which have gained more importance as his writing developed in the second half of the 20^th century. These include a gradual change in his philosophy from phenomenology, in which we endeavour to create conditions in which it is possible for truths to emerge from reality, towards a hermeneutical approach, in which the search for truths is more assertive and develops from a desire to find out what signs, symbols, language and actions really mean, in the knowledge that this will only ever be partially successful.

How can we, surrounded as we are by postmodern irony, entertain some acknowledgement of the hopeful, the emotional, the good, the trusting and the provisional? For some people such vocabulary, like the words ‘duty’ and ‘virtue’, may seem too ‘freighted with attitudes they reject’ (O’Neill 1993:107). In a time of suffering and despair Ricoeur attempts to rehabilitate hope. He calls his work a philosophical anthropology. In this anthropology we can include his unique philosophy and also his analyses of the rich seam of Western philosophy, that he has mined in his own way, giving us, for example, a Kant akin to continental philosophy, more subjective than the Kant of the analytical schools (1998: 49-50). His style of thinking has been called painstaking, his style of writing has been called lugubrious (Clark). He is certainly not easy to read, yet through struggling with his works I have become able to apply philosophy to the life I live, and attempt to improve what I do. There is a vitality to his work that cuts through the vocabulary of scepticism and postmodern positioning. I propose that it is possible to apply Ricoeur’s writings to the ethico-practical problems that beset us daily. His true value can be seen when his work functions as a critical companion for action. Within ‘action’ I include the writing of challenging texts as well as physical action and mental activity that involve the self and the other more directly than through text alone.

He gives us texts that contain, and also, by their structure, embody his ideas, i.e. we become absorbed in his dialectical debates and find ourselves thinking more clearly at the end, with a new world of possibilities in front of the text. He makes powerful use of metaphor as a unit of meaning, at word, phrase and sentence level, and analyses the role metaphor can play in developing our thought (Time & Narrative, The Rule of Metaphor). He writes passionately about other aspects of language, such as the importance of the verb in Fallible Man.

The following summary aims to highlight some of his significant texts that can give an impression of the power of his writing. Dates given are of the English translations. He confronts the qualitative: quantitative divide in the social sciences and provides viable solutions in Hermeneutics of the Human Sciences (1981). He sees man as intrinsically sundered from self, yet able, with hope, to achieve a great deal by deciding in favour of good acts in Fallible Man (1965), The Just (2000). He writes in a spiritually enlightening style, yet without privileging his own (Protestant) religion over any other. He often keeps his explicitly religious writings separate in Figuring The Sacred (1995). In History & Truth (1965), and Hermeneutics of the Human Sciences (1981) he shows that the history of our world and our thought is vitally important for understanding who we are and what we can do and he develops a pluralist position to problem solving, without the ethical confusion of relativism. In Fallible Man and The Conflict of Interpretations (1974) (essays spanning 1960-69) he asks us to accept that truth is provisional, without the fatalistic fear that can accompany such insight, because he believes that we can make ethically sound judgements. In his work on Freud, Ricoeur’s description of a memory as a fragment of a life, part of a story that has a narrative structure and a human meaning, imbues our perceptions with value (Freud & Philosophy 1981:253-254). He offers us the chance to re-claim the vital narrative element to the way we think and looks at time. In Time & Narrative (volumes 1-3, 1984-8) he explores how perplexing time is, as it is both a brief moment and also part of a continuum, and this influences our lives. In Fallible Man (1965) and Oneself as Another (1992) (thirty years apart) he tells us about our relationship with ourselves and how the self is reflected in the other, seeking to recommend that we see the self as another, trying to establish a position between Descartes’ rational man and Nietzsche’s doubting man. He explores the need for us to be able to see ourselves in others, the need to endorse heterogeneity yet also bring together in harmony, many heterogeneous features in ourselves and our cultures. There is a need here to go from the specific to the general and back again. Ricoeur believes that we can use hermeneutical concepts and ways of thinking to ensure that there is a relationship between the particular specifics of life and the generalities that we use to make sense of them (1981:43-44). Ethics are the instruments of our personal desire to live a moral life, in which action is praxis, good action in the Aristotelian sense. In Memory, History, Forgetting (2004) he seeks to make connections between Time & Narrative and Oneself as Another, exploring the possibilities of different kinds of remembering and their value for our understanding.

For Ricoeur the human being ‘does not coincide with himself’ and thus actions that are inconsistent with our wishes, can creep into the fault line between our intentions and our hoped-for actions. We are unable to fulfil our hopes, because of complex contingent imperfections within ourselves and our situations. We become beset by sadness that takes two forms. One is the sadness of not being able to be sure of the worthwhile-ness of our existence and the other is the sadness of the finite, the limitations of our existence. As a possible solution Ricoeur sees a surplus of meaning that necessitates provisionality, yet offers multiple interpretations and fruitful possibilities in return for such instability. Ricoeur believes in optimism as a fundamental right of humans, and an optimism that allows us to consider possibilities and not be trammelled by pessimism or the constraints of imposed forces. He believes in ‘central intuition’, as a pre-philosophical level. By this he means that before we thought it through at an intellectual level, we intuitively knew that existence and being are ultimately meaningful, if we allow ourselves to sense the worthwhile nature of being alive. Thus there is always going to be a surplus of meaning, a ‘superabundance of sense,’ which ensures that being and goodness do coincide.

Is this all likely to invoke a ‘Bah! Humbug!’ response? Yes. Ricoeur can often be seen as a mild conciliator, a painstaking peacemaker without the grit of a Derrida, for example, and become relegated to the footnotes of other philosophers. Indeed there is often dissatisfaction expressed about the lack of decisiveness in his work (described by Thompson, Clark and Norris) The canon of Ricoeur’s work is also rather intimidating, because of its volume and range. Ricoeur has been writing for over sixty years and an attempt to give a comprehensive analysis of this work in a paper of this size will fail. For bibliographical guidance on Ricoeur’s work, an updated listing by Frans Vansina, originally published by Vansina in 1985, can be found in L.E. Hahn (ed) 1995. Both the magnitude and also the nature of his writing are relatively resistant to compression, and for more detailed writings about Ricoeur, I refer the reader to Dosse (text in French), Hahn, Valdes, Kearney, Rasmussen, Muldoon, Sims and Kaplan and my papers for application of Ricoeur’s philosophy to race relations.

For the purposes of this lecture I will present a brief introductory analysis of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, then of Explaining and Understanding, an arena to explore the difficulties experienced by all sciences. I then propose to give a flavour of his work on metaphor, to show an example of how he invites us to re-possess the educative power of language. This is followed by a summary of some of his work on action, in which he takes the approach that both text and action hold meaning that we should feel responsible for. His work on justice is briefly touched upon, as it represents a late yet important crystallisation in his thinking of a lifelong pre-occupation that hethen focused on in the 1990s.

Ricoeur’s Hermeneutical Reconciliation

Hermeneutics is the theory and practice of interpretation (Greek hermeneia.) The hermeneutics movement attempts to look very closely at the way in which we think, the way we choose and marshal our evidence and the types of understanding that we bring to bear on evidence, such as the artefacts of our human existence and texts. It developed out of Husserl’s work. Husserl (1859-1938) developed phenomenology, a descriptive philosophy of experience that sought absolute truths through human intuition. Ricoeur believes that hermeneutics, although it owes much to phenomenology, has more to offer than phenomenology’s inevitable failure of trying to be purely intuitive. He defines hermeneutics as the theory of the operations of understanding in their relation to the interpretation of texts (1981:43). He sees text as actual and also metaphorical in that it represents our constructed beliefs about ourselves and others, our handling of history and our records for future perusal and hermeneutic exploration. In hermeneutics the ultimate ontological question (what do I believe exists?) is about the meaning of being and, for Ricoeur,(1913-) it is not possible to find a satisfactory answer because the question is unaskable. Moreover he believes that the best we can do will be distorted because we cannot approach truth head-on, only ever sideways, through symbols, stories, images, ideologies and texts (1981:51). Ricoeur’s belief is that existence and being are ultimately meaningful, as encapsulated in the title of Van Leeuven’s book about Ricoeur; The Surplus of Meaning (1981). One of the devices that Ricoeur uses to approach these meanings as closely as one can, is that of textual analysis.

Textual analysis was a form of interpretation that was present before hermeneutics and involved producing an interconnection between signs in the text and understanding in the reader, so that we can, indirectly, reproduce the mental life of some writers for their readers. For the early hermeneutical thinkers like Schleiermacher (1768-1834) and Dilthey (1833-1911), text was a vital manifestation by the writer of their ‘self’ and, as such, was the crucial step towards objectification i.e. the act whereby the subject becomes their own object and achieves thereby some understanding of themselves. What interests Ricoeur even more than this is what he calls the provisionality of meaning. The idea of meaning so universal that it transcends all other is attractive, because it could confer security and even power on the knower. But for Ricoeur universal understanding will never be possible. Some interpretations of life and truth may be more attractive than others, according to an individual’s epistemological preferences, yet none will ever be final.

He provides an antidote to the technicist model of precision reality that currently occupies a privileged position in our educational culture, with his ‘philosophy without any absolute’ (as he describes it in his Intellectual Autobiography (Hahn, 1998: 13)). It is the right of the human mind to set itself free from such constraints and allow us instead of being self-effacing and effaced by technocracy, to assert our right to have ‘a mind of our own’. Then we come up against the original problem about evidence. Can we justify, to others, our claims to have found (objective) truth if the main archive of evidence is the (subjective) workings of our own minds? This may be possible if we expose our reasoning to others, so that they can share our thought patterns and decide for themselves about the robustness or otherwise of our thinking. By grappling with the dilemmas of interpretative, hermeneutic philosophy we are helping the mind to discover the mind, and the mind of the other person. This is a risky endeavour because it can serve to challenge the deeply held view that knowledge must have unshakeable foundations - what knowledge and what foundations?

If we accept Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, we believe that there is meaning to be found in all human actions and thoughts for developing an ontology of action (unlike the suspicion and doubt prevalent in much so-called postmodern thinking). In order to make this discussion possible within hermeneutics, Ricoeur believes that it is vital to understand our cultural heritage and to use that as a way of understanding how to think (1981:119) He attaches a great deal of importance to the movement known as historical idealism and uses themes from that discipline to face us with some difficult problems. He provides us with specific, well-developed strategies of thought that merit rehearsal. They include the ability to understand our past that we can gain from historical sensitivity. They also include the ability to accept alienation (Verfremdung), to face up to our prejudices and to develop the concept of the self, partly by analysing texts and actions. Ricoeur sees the need to avoid defining hermeneutics as highly subjective, as Dilthey would, because he sees most human knowledge as subjective, yet none the less real for that. The hermeneutic circle that torments the social sciences (i.e the knowledge that we are both subject and object of our own study) must apply to an extent to all human endeavour. He argues instead for a hermeneutic arch (1981:155-159) linking explanation (structural analysis) and understanding (interpretation), with reading as the recovery of meaning.

Explaining and Understanding

In analysing text for us Ricoeur becomes intrigued by a major problem in the social and the natural sciences; the apparent paradox of using Explaining, the science of language (accurate, analytical, measurable), to develop Understanding, the philosophy of language (interpretive, emotive, conjectural). The 19^th century German philosopher Dilthey is often seen (by Hammersley, Taylor and Ricoeur for example) as the one responsible for formalising the differences between natural sciences and historical studies into an opposition that has become entrenched and causes a great deal of trouble for the social sciences.

He seeks at all times to resolve such tensions as this may cause, often in fact maintaining the tension in order to resolve differences at the most intractable point in the debate. For example, when deconstructing Explaining and Understanding, he seeks to reclaim Explaining for Understanding, in order to achieve interpretative powers that make use of different, almost incompatible ways of thinking. Ricoeur develops this creative tension that arises through the juxtaposition of differences and the ambivalence of meanings, to help us face the ambiguities of our actions and those of others. Language is a form of action and our actions can be read as if they were text. The defining characteristic of the human is our narrative capacity and Ricoeur sees this as the way in which we can better understand ourselves through others. He sees our need to understand our history, to both alienate ourselves from and understand fully, the narrative reasons we give for our actions. Finally he offers us hope that it is possible to create various possible scenes ‘in front of the text’ that will allow us to work within the complexities of life at a provisional level for as long as possible, seeking reasonable resolution. If we can pre-empt premature foreclosure we may be able to see solutions to conflicts that would otherwise be lost.

Ricoeur attempts to meld the cool, alienated objectivity of science with the creative, self-absorbed belongingness of history and the arts. He sees both as vital components of the human experience and uses language analysis as one way of showing their compatibility. In turning to the text and meaningful action, Ricoeur struggles to release himself and us from the dichotomy that Dilthey has bequeathed us. He believes it to be the greatest challenge facing hermeneutics (1981:43). He sees it still in Gadamer’s work. He wonders whether Gadamer’s book title, Truth and Method, should be entitled Truth OR Method, because of the implied and (he believes) unhelpful, polarity. We can take on method by following the ‘scientific’ paradigm – which would deprive us of the ‘ontological density of the reality we study’ (1981:131). Alternatively we can renounce the objectivity of the human sciences and seek truth as we believe appropriate. He seeks a dominant phenomenon that resists ‘alienating distance’ and ‘participatory belonging.’ He chooses text as a vehicle to develop such a phenomenon, both for its inherent characteristics and for its ability to combine explaining and understanding.

Living Language and its metaphors

For Ricoeur text is heuristic: we can learn from text, and I hope to indicate this by a brief exploration of his use of metaphor, one, rather special aspect of language .The text is defined as any discourse fixed by writing, and as an archive available for individual and collective meaning. He uses the word discourse to encapsulate the events that take place when someone speaks. For Ricoeur the text is the cultural ground on which the reader appropriates (aneignet) the author’s thoughts, which are alienated (verfremdet) from the author by the act of writing. Text is more than intersubjective communication, it uses distance to decontextualise itself, taking it away from its author and giving it to its readers, with their own interpretation of the text and their relationship to it. The text is separate from both its creator and its interpreter and creates the reader anew, by the world that unfolds in front of the text. This new world creates an intersubjectivity that has made it possible for me to read Ricoeur and write this sentence and understand it, although I used not to. Ricoeur develops the concept of appropriation (Aneignung), that allows the reader to follow the ‘direction’ – sens – as well as meaning – sens - (sense) and thereby both distance themselves and draw closer to the meaning of the text (1981:161).

He gives us a bold understanding of text as heuristic with the power of fiction to transcend the here and now and open our minds to the essences of truth that we can glimpse through our lives, yet never see clearly- this relates to the hermeneutic provisionality of truth. As an antidote to tightly argued systems, such as those subsumed within positivism, Ricoeur provides a more dialectical structure of question and answer. He takes different sets of ideas and opposes them to one another in order to propose a resolution of conflict, as seen, for example, with his exploration of Gadamer’s hermeneutics (1981:64-78) and Habermas’ critique of ideology (1981:78-87) followed by his melding of the two (1981:63-100).

What do we mean by metaphor? Metaphor suggests similarities between two elements that are different and connects them with an intensity that is weakened in the simile by its use of ‘like’; ‘Achilles is a lion’ is a metaphor, whereas ‘Achilles is like a lion’ is a simile. A metaphor invites us to see something familiar in a new light. Aristotle famously declared that we must master metaphor if we are to master speech. Nietzsche and Derrida doubted the potential of metaphor to excite us, seeing more of the dead metaphor that suffuses our language with meaning in a way that we no longer notice and therefore its influence, if there is indeed any residual effect, will be covert, deceitful, underhand. Ricoeur also comments on dead metaphor that we take for granted and do not notice, such as ‘sunset’. Ricoeur’s impressive study, La Métaphore Vive, sets itself and us on a different track with its analysis of metaphor as a living organism, although the English translation of the title, The Rule of Metaphor, in attempting to show the power of metaphor, strikes to my mind a sterner note. We can create for ourselves, or enjoy in text created by others, living metaphors that allow us to be imaginative and creative and to think more.

The Enlightenment movement, (an interesting metaphor) provided a challenge for metaphor, by becoming suspicious of the capacity of metaphor to provide different types of truth to those based on scientific evidence-based facts. Metaphorical and literal were seen to be very different and antithetical to one another. This meant that metaphor could be seen to be contaminating ‘truth’ with aesthetic, emotive and therefore possibly deceptive imagery. Metaphor has been at the heart of religious thinking for a very long time, as we see when we remind ourselves of the Christian communion statement upon which the idea of transubstantiation is based: ‘this is my body, this is my blood’. We know also that much thinking, both scientific and not, is influenced by metaphor, as Hesse shows us (1966). Beardsley, Wheelwright, Black and Hesse all explore the potency of metaphor, yet Ricoeur has worked perhaps more extensively than any other twentieth century thinker on metaphor.

In the seventh study of The Rule of Metaphor Ricoeur explores the idea that metaphor can re-describe the world we live in and therefore shows that poetic language has a reference point, a referent. In developing an argument that is logical and clear Ricoeur also argues that, if the above is true, metaphor has the capacity to destroy literal meaning and the possibility of a referent for the sentence. A possibility of destruction posits a relationship and therefore, metaphorical meaning can have the advantages conferred by such a relationship as well as the destructive possibilities, creating the possibility to create a new referent, a new world of the text. Ricoeur accepts that not all language could ever be poetic or metaphorical, indeed that would be a denial of the tension created between ordinary language and the creative excitement of metaphor exploiting the ambiguity of ordinary language, challenging conventions and triggering new ideas.

Interview with Reagan, 1982 in 1996:107

‘Metaphor is more than just a trope, or rhetorical ornament’ (Hermeneutics of Action. (1996:28)). He believes that metaphor is stronger than analogy (a is to b as c is to d), that metaphor helps the Kantian attempt to retain belief in being, and that the human imagination can therefore use metaphor in order to transform problems into resolvable forms. Ricoeur is surprised at Heidegger’s denial that metaphor could serve thought when Heidegger claims that ‘the metaphorical exists only within the metaphysical’, and notes that Heidegger himself frequently uses metaphor (Rule of Metaphor 1978: 280).

Freud’s analysis of the dream as a vehicle for a metaphorical working through of our hopes and fears gave Ricoeur a profound respect for Freud’s emphasis on the unconscious workings of the mind. To see repression and metaphor as one and the same phenomenon is a partially accurate explanation for Ricoeur, but he believes that we must also see the metaphor of a repressed desire or fear as a way in which the patient’s concerns can be expressed and therefore have the potential to go beyond repression. He rejects Jones’ way of rendering repression harmless; according to Jones symbolism is always grounded in forbidden impulses. Thus the role of metaphor is to replace symbolism with a harmless representation of the abstract forbidden thing, in terms of a concrete and permissible phenomenon; e.g. the serpent, a sexual symbol, becomes the metaphor of wisdom. For Ricoeur the metaphor creates new possibilities for interpreting one’s hopes and fears, and Jones’ version would only be appropriate for the relatively simple images allowed within ordinary language.

In his own writing Ricoeur makes use of metaphor, of which I give here two examples. The first is a metaphor in the symmetrical form of analogy. (A is to B as C is to D). Ricoeur asserts that metaphor is more powerful than analogy, yet the combination is highly evocative, as seen in this textual image from Fallible Man, which sums up his main starting point for that book;

Some of his metaphors are derived directly or indirectly from the classical world, steeped as he is in Plato, Aristotle and others, as shown in his discussion in The Hermeneutics of the Human Sciences of the intractable dangers of allowing research methodologies to over-determine our interpretations of reality;

Ultimately, despite his devotion of a whole book to metaphor, Ricoeur also, characteristically, offers an alternative view. In Hahn’s Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, Ricoeur responds to Mary Gerhart’s assertion (although she then refutes it herself) that some say he has misjudged the role of metaphor in philosophy. He states in response that the true place for metaphor is in poetics, and that it occupies a secondary place in philosophy. We see this in Ricoeur’s

Indeed this is consistent with Ricoeur’s beliefs, despite Clark’s assertion to the contrary, as Ricoeur here manifests his belief that philosophy is a discipline like any other form of argument, with limitations. Metaphor has limitations too, yet, like philosophy, requires that we show interest and understanding of the practice of taking some control of language and understanding both the limits and the potential of such tropes as metaphor, in order to create a new world in front of the text that can help us understand. The arena for this can be philosophy, poetry, drama, for example. How valuable this is, given the current state of much spoken and written English, with its bland, bleached characteristics; ordinary language with its fear of ambiguity and yet its inability to stop language from still having the organic power to trigger ideas in us.

It can be seen in Ricoeur’s work that the metaphor has the potential to be a moral force for good. Ricoeur developed his work from rejection of the single word as metaphor, in the Aristotelian sense, to advocacy of metaphor as a semantic event that encompasses a sentence in The Rule of Metaphor. He then developed a philosophy in which the narrative identity provides the individual with some sense of time as a partially comprehensible progression, in Time & Narrative. Then, in Oneself as Another, he shows us that the shortest path to self-understanding, using narrative sensitivity in order to grapple with time, is through understanding another person. In this way the other person becomes, if you will, a metaphor for each of us. I can only understand myself if I see the other as similar to me while at the same time different, of course, because they are not me. As with the images evoked within the tension of a metaphor, the similarities are enhanced by the differences, and this is particularly true in race relations work, where it is so easy to see the differences and ignore the similarities, arriving at an adversarial position that denies affinity and generates conflict. The morals of metaphor when taken in this frame, can provide a way for the self and the other to accept otherness as a feature that does indeed create tension, but yet without which we could not develop a selfhood, an identity.

Of course Clark is also right to note that Ricoeur seems to step back from his conclusion; he does this repeatedly in his writing. For example at the end of Time & Narrative we see him apparently relinquishing his hard won position that narrative is ethical, because he cedes that narrative does indeed have fatal flaws, such as its potential to attribute causality where there may be none (here we see ideas like those of Hume come back to remind us of this), and the fact that philosophy does not have any compulsion to adopt narrative, despite its many humanly rich attributes. So here, with metaphor, as Clark points out, Ricoeur does it again; he denies the power of metaphor to get philosophy out of difficulties, such as the possibility to create a brave new world in front of the text that will save us. Why does he appear to capitulate? Some reasons have been rehearsed here already, such as the fact that metaphor cannot dominate philosophy because it is only one trope among many. More importantly, Ricoeur sees the impossibility of using even metaphor, one of the most creative forms of language, to glean anything more than a provisional sort of truth that may help us, perhaps, yet cannot be definitive, and we need to use other means in order to attempt the impossible; an understanding of the self and the other in the world we share. This capitulation simply reminds us of the complexity of both philosophy and metaphor, yet should not detract from the richness of Ricoeur’s model of metaphor, a powerful instrument to help us think more clearly by showing us a tension caused by similarities within differences and differences within similarities. Ultimately of course he is reminding us that we cannot take shelter in any one set of ideas or techniques, but must take control of our own thinking, of which metaphor can and should form a part, if we wish to live a moral life for ourselves, with others and within just institutions. For Ricoeur text is a form of action and action can be analysed as if it were a sort of text: both reflect our thinking, for which we should take as full a responsibility as we can, taking account of our knowledge of our potential for evil and our capacity for self deception.

Interpreting action as sedimentation in social time

Ricoeur argues that actions can be analysed in a similar way to text. Ricoeur has already asked science for our ball back; he wishes to facilitate the use of both explanatory and interpretative methods in developing hermeneutical grasp of phenomena. Simple recording of data so that they can be analysed, or allowed to speak for themselves (as in Taylor’s term brute data) is valuable and can yield good information, but it is not enough. When we wish to go beyond the empiricist approach, seeking understanding of the thoughts or contextual phenomena, for example, which may be hidden behind the actions, we will have the action recorded in a variety of ways:

This will facilitate, if we desire it, a less personal analysis than if we were relying on memory alone (and memory, as Freud has persuaded us, can be a fascinating yet complex place to record our experiences). Ricoeur is in no doubt about the complexity of action as a human phenomenon, and he does not believe that we should give up trying to understand it. I believe he gives me another way of using language to talk about the fleeting yet sometimes shockingly powerful nature of action (1981:204). He believes that the social nature of actions makes the roles, the intentional causalities, of each of the actors indistinguishable from the roles of the others, and that the meaning (as construed by others) and the intention (as understood by the actor) are complex in their relationship to each other. Yet we know that many actions do have an impact that suggests they are significant and not to be relegated to chance understanding. We speak of actions ‘leaving their mark’ and Ricoeur construes this as documentation of human action, a ‘sedimentation in social time’.

We also know that our actions leave our control once we have done the deed and that they can have effects that we did not intend. When the importance of an action goes beyond its initial situation, either by intent or by accident, this action becomes meaningful in a way that causes it to leave its mark on others and on the situation and possibly on the path of history. Those who study action can construe this in different ways. For Winch, the object of the social sciences is a ‘rule governed behaviour’. For Ricoeur, this rule should not be superimposed; it is the meaning as articulated from within these sedimented or institutionalised works of action;

For Ricoeur text itself provides the opportunity to develop new ideas, new identity and new plans for action (1989:95-100). For him the aim of all hermeneutics is to oppose both historical alienation (as seen in the reflective Kantian tradition) and cultural distance (as seen in the speculative Hegelian tradition). This is another sense in which Ricoeur (1990:319-329) shows us that text without opinionated tone can help us to become attuned to the thoughts of others. For Ricoeur Explaining and Understanding are vital features here also:

By this argument Ricoeur is showing us the vital position occupied by text. Instead of viewing text purely and simply as a means of recording evidence and ideas, a vehicle only, Ricoeur shows us that text takes on a life of its own. Interpretation is to follow the path of thought opened up by the text, to place oneself ‘en route’ towards the ‘orient’ of the text, following the ‘sens’; (direction as well as meaning).

He faces up to the fragility and fallible nature of each human, struggling to find meaning in past action, current state and future options and the terrible tragedies of history. His writing invites the reader to explore the mind and confront the complexities of modern life using modern hermeneutical philosophy to help. The understanding we seek will always elude us. One of the major techniques here is personal engagement with text, which is vital for any form of knowledge. This process involves practical appropriation of meaning, which transforms the individual and the individual’s practices. Ricoeur puts great emphasis on that rich vein of practical knowledge that is found in the moment of meeting between the memory and the expectation, between what we know and what we hope for (what Ricoeur calls ‘l’espace d’experience’ and ‘horizon d’attente’). Many such moments will lead to the practical knowledge that, as Jervolino puts it, cannot be ‘spliced onto the reductive concepts of modern science’ (in Kearney1996: 75).

Ricoeur and Justice

He is pre-occupied with suffering, evil and the shortcomings of justice, and brings to ethics the ability to debate our responsibility for our actions. For van Leeuwen, Ricoeur’s philosophy is characterised by ‘a sort of non-conclusive dialectic of hope’. This assertion of hope from Ricoeur, a writer who lived through active service and imprisonment in WWII and one of whose children committed suicide, is a powerful statement of himself as optimist in his texts. Ricoeur gives a human focus to his texts that engages the reader’s humanity, as seen in his later preoccupation with justice and the law. This has challenged Ricoeur to address the injustices of human suffering. Moreover, legal systems as a way of dealing with injustice and suffering, pose Ricoeur with apparently insurmountable problems, related to selfhood, conscience and difficulties in being fair about differing claims to justice. In Oneself as Another (1992) he tries to connect the ethical problem of personal responsibility (ipseite) with the narrative structure of the individual person and sees our attempts to be consistent and keep promises over time as a way to engage with such problems as, legal rights, justice and conscience. For Ricoeur legal systems comprise apparently contradictory components: reason as the arbiter of truth, short term decision making that ends uncertainty and frequently leads to foreclosure on fair solutions, and the difficulty that we experience in putting ourselves in the other’s position. Ricoeur explores Rawls’ abstract and procedural universalism, with the fable of the ‘veil of ignorance’, in order to see what legal systems would be like if they were determined by Kant’s request that we should not do to others what we do not want done to ourselves. Ricoeur deconstructs the writings of Habermas, Walzer and of Boltanski and Thevenot and (in The Just, 2000) finds more aporias in the sense of the state as a source of right; the modern complexities of nationality and border identity put the state in the uncomfortable role of being both whole and part, container and contained, inclusive agency and included region (2000:93). This supranational phenomenon can be further amplified by the ‘conversion’ principle, whereby social goods in the form of money become translated to another sphere of justice; political power, and cross borders. Ricoeur describes this conversion, a form of dominance, as ‘a kind of symbolic violence’ (2000:87-8). Such violence to the rights of others can only be avoided by fragile compromises, which tacitly perpetuate conversion, such as we see in both the injustices and the kindnesses that rich nations mete out to poorer ones.

Ricoeur’s philosophy could be a liberating means of deepening a currently shallow debate in the UK, where a new citizenship curriculum strand is being introduced, intended to teach children about their local and national government systems, and also about community initiatives and foreign aid work. Ricoeur understands what this should be rooted in better than most; compassion for others, an ability to see the self in another, to recognise the other as both different and similar and to have the self-belief to act on this where possible.

Conclusions

Ricoeur is not as confident as Hegel about the outcomes of history, yet he is convinced that it is vital to attempt a balance of life forces: he tries to take apparently opposed ideas and help to position them into some sort of reconciliation. He accepts that this opposition can be an artificial creation, reflected in the juxtaposition of two concepts (such as work-speech, socius-neighbour, and later, Explaining and Understanding), yet this both reflects a popular human device and also helps to avoid foreclosure on possibilities, foreclosure that occurs when we seek premature solutions. This is not to be achieved by dis-empowering one or the other or both juxtaposed concepts, but by using both, living at the tension point between the two, by pointing out our own weaknesses and by finding commonalities that are shared by apparently opposing forces. Such a ‘postponement of the solution to all dialectics’ (History & Truth 1965: 12) permits us to hold a hopeful position. Ricoeur’s philosophy, at least partly because of his debt to Hegel’s dialectical thinking, is therefore also more optimistic than that of many modern thinkers. Ricoeur believes that we know how to refuse to give priority to nonsense, necessity and evil and that we must attend to the pre-philosophical understanding that we all have, that existence and being are ultimately meaningful. This ‘superabundance of sense’ means that being and goodness do coincide. There is, however, no absolute truth to comfort those who seek it because what I see is not the world as such, but what the world means for me. Van Leeuwen writes about this area in Ricoeur’s thought with regard to eschatology, the four last things; death, judgement, heaven and hell. We can be inspired by Ricoeur without entering the ecclesiastical ‘final vocabulary’ (Rorty), and derive ethical strength from Ricoeur’s philosophy. Ricoeur tries to establish a philosophy in ‘a style of ‘yes’’, characterised by joy and affirmation, not by sadness and negation, as explained by van Leeuwen, (1981:32).

One of Ricoeur’s great achievements is to insist that interpretative understanding and scientific explanation must keep talking to each other, in order to deepen both ways of thinking and strengthen our ontological understanding of the way we are. Text has the power of fiction to combine Explaining and Understanding and allow us to explore possibilities. We are both Hoelderlin’s poets and Husserl’s empiricists and the dialectical process of saying ‘yes’ to both urges will help us to think more clearly. Thus hermeneutics gives us a powerful way of debating our difficulties. Ricoeur understands how hard this all is, as shown in his autobiography in Hahn, and states that

Alison Scott-Baumann