Philosophy, Ethics, and Politics. Paul Ricoeur
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what makes them worthy of respect, is not situated on the plane of morality alone, but on the plane of the political as well, making the Polis the place where human capacities are realized. In this regard, I would say that there are vast numbers of men and women who, for me, are faceless, but with respect to whom I have rights and duties. This is the level of the institution, notably of power and of the political. The idea that there are two others – the other who is close, the other of encounters and dialogues, and a distant other, who exists as a relation in and through an institution – this idea should have a place in contemporary philosophy. The other, too quickly and too facilely, becomes “you” (“toi”), whereas in reality relations of friendship and love stand out against a backdrop of otherness that extends to the frontiers of humanity. There is, in this regard, a beautiful passage in Perpetual Peace by the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, where he asserts that this peace implies a “universal hospitality.”
I would like to interrupt your reflection here with a question that to me seems not unrelated to current events. Even though certain teleological interpretations of Karl Marx – in the mode of “communism is the society of bright tomorrows” – have given birth to monstrosities from the standpoint of human emancipation, do you think there could still be a future for a deontology in which Marx would be seen as a thinker of the possible?
With other thinkers, I share the view that it is as if Marx’s work were covered over by Marxism, in particular by the German Marxism of the Second International. In truth, what failed historically was the legacy of that Marxism. From this sprang the invention of the most stupid conceptions, such as the opposition between “proletarian science” and “bourgeois science,” “proletarian art” and “bourgeois art.” And probably also the idea that politics, morality, and religion are “superstructures.” Now, basically everything is both infrastructure and superstructure, depending on the standpoint of the analysis. Our problem is to determine to what extent Marx is left unscathed by all this. The end of ideological Marxism – that is to say, of Marxism used as a justification for political power – frees Marx for readings in which we can read him in exactly the same way as the economists he criticized. With Marx, in fact, we have three questions on our hands!
Starting off, does anything remain of his economics in an age in which production is no longer the extension of human physical effort – as were the energies exerted in the nineteenth century – but instead, with cybernetics, an extension of the brain, of logic? Does Marx belong to an outmoded technological era, or does his work contain a way of conceptualizing “living labor” that continues to be effective? I believe that this must be approached in a free and open manner, now that power is no longer at stake here. We can reread his work freely and tranquilly, in the same way we would do for Spinoza or Kant.
Next, in addition to determining up to what point Marx is untouched by the deviations that claimed to follow from his thought, we must also determine to what extent he did justice to the specificity of the political realm. I had doubts about this after the events in central Europe. Is there not in Marx the prejudice (in the strong sense of the term) that there is no history proper to the political and that the latter is nothing but an effect of the history of economics? I believe that important segments of the history of Europe have not been sufficiently considered. I have in mind the history of free cities – Italian, Flemish, Hanseatic – and not simply those of English parliamentary democracy. There is perhaps a properly political history of liberty which overlaps and intersects with the history of the relations between labor and capital. And, based on this, there may be an evil specific to politics that is not necessarily the expression of the economic evil of exploitation, an evil that would stem from the very exercise of power. A certain silence of Marx on this aspect has created a breach in which openly Machiavellian uses of power have been swallowed up.
Finally, on the symbolic level of signs, language, and norms – a level that is foundational in its own way – do we not encounter the limit of an explanation referring back to Marx? For example, if mechanization did not develop in Antiquity, it was not only because there were slaves, but also because in that period work was not valued as the expression and the means of human education and development. Is it not only once labor has become fundamental to the education of the human species that its emancipation will be called for? This question concerns the place of technologies in relation not only to the political realm but to the symbolic realm as well. This is the domain that was the most deeply concealed by Marxism after Marx. I condemn this period for its occultation of the profound resources of Marx’s work, the essential content of which was hidden behind a very ideological vision serving to justify a power which itself was in no way grounded in the great texts of Marx.
In Oneself as Another you reserve the term “ethics” for the “aim of an accomplished life” and the term “morality” for “the articulation of this aim in norms characterized at once by the claim to universality and by an effect of constraint.”6 You write: “‘From you,’ says the other, ‘I expect that you will keep your word’; to you, I reply: ‘You can count on me.’”7 In this way, do you think you have succeeded in articulating the contradiction between the claim to universality of human rights and duties on the one hand, and the singularity of each individual on the other?
Today we have models of universalities that have nothing to do with that proposed by Hegel, or any other philosophy of history. We have the model of the American philosopher, John Rawls, with his theory of justice. Or that of the German philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, with his ethics of communication and argumentation. What is universal is the capacity for argumentation, independent of the content of the arguments. Today the problem is no longer linking the universal to the singular but rather the abstract universal to the historical. This debate finds one of its expressions in the rebirth of nationalism. On the one hand, nationalism seduces by the concrete richness of its content, its mores, its practices, its shared convictions, and ultimately by its purely ethnic identity. On the other hand, a purely abstract conception of universality leaves us unsatisfied. One of our great contemporary problems lies in connecting this abstract universal with the history of communities. On one side, we find the tradition of the social contract, which is an abstract reality, and on the other, the tradition of shared communities, which are concrete realities.
There are parts of the world where this dilemma has not yet reached maturity or where it is not even perceived at all. Whether this is in Yugoslavia or in other conflicts of the same type, we lack a sense of history in this regard. In our geopolitical era, we are judging within the framework of a political morality born in 1945. At that time, we made a sort of pledge, implicit throughout all of Europe, that we would no longer treat one another as we had previously done in world wars. However, there is a part of Europe where this message was not received, and it continues to behave as we had up to 1945. I am also thinking of Algeria, confronted with two forms of corruption, that of the FIS [Front islamique du salut] and that of the FLN State [Front de libération nationale]. In regressive situations such as these, faced with grave moments of disaster, only a few committed individuals, only a few indomitable consciences, are responsible, in reality, for the future of civilized society. For me, conviction is the response to crisis: my place is assigned, the hierarchy of preferences compels me, the intolerable transforms me from a timid or disinterested spectator into a person of conviction, who discovers in creating and creates in discovering. The lucidity of our gaze does not spare us from engagement in protest or from the will to repair breaches.
Your philosophical thought seems to me to be based more on a reinterpretation of Kantian republicanism than on an act of religious faith. For, if every person is to be considered an end in himself or herself and not a means to an external end, does this not presuppose that in reality it is otherwise? Have you not asked yourself whether what is left unexamined in this Kantian precept is not, deep down, the exploitation of one person by another?
In one of his political writings, Kant speaks of “unsocial sociability.” On the judicial level, the law, and on the political level, the Rule of Law [l’État de droit], serve to make possible the coexistence of beings whose desires and interests are often in conflict. The fact that we aren’t at one another’s throats, that we accept to live together,