Philosophy, Ethics, and Politics. Paul Ricoeur
Читать онлайн книгу.
United States and the encounter with new philosophical approaches. Perhaps, in addition, he was attesting to a conviction he never ceased to hold: the opacity of the present for its contemporaries. Physically absent from the debates of the intelligentsia in France, he confronts them at a distance from the noise of the media. From Chicago, he studies Althusser’s interpretation of Marx.2
The interviews collected in this volume thus belong to a period in which Ricoeur deems it possible to once again let his voice be heard in France. Chance solicitations play an important role, but there is no doubt that the reduction of ideological polarities in the course of the 1980s assisted in this return to favor. What is heard is not “moderation” or “ecumenism” with which the philosopher was so often reproached, but the method to which he submitted each of his interventions. One characteristic of Ricoeur’s thought is, in fact, never separating the study of a problem (the will, interpretation, action, time, etc.) from questions of method. There is no hiatus between what philosophy does and the reflection on what it can do: describing the will is also questioning the limits of phenomenology with respect to the question of evil;3 thinking about time is also delegating to narrative what reason alone cannot comprehend.4
What is true about the philosophy is also true about the philosopher who expresses himself publicly without claiming a higher order of knowledge. Ricoeur thematizes this method of intervention as early as 1965 in “Tâches de l’éducateur politique” [“Tasks of the Political Educator”], his most extensive text on the question of engagement.5 Despite its Platonic undertones, the expression “political educator” refers to the pedagogical effort Ricoeur appreciated in Pierre Mendès-France and that he found again later in Michel Rocard (see their dialogue, Chapter 6). To the extent he exposes his thought to the risks inherent in social transformation, the philosopher himself is also expected to specify the areas of his intervention. In this text, Ricoeur distinguishes three levels of society: “tools” (modes of production and the global accumulation of technology), “institutions” (whose character is tied to national cultures), and “values” (which claim to be universal). The discourse of the political educator cannot be confined to the abstract level of values if it hopes to avoid the danger of succumbing to “the deadly illusion of a disengaged, disincarnated conception of the intellectual.”6
Instead of legislating, the philosopher has to cross through the universe of tools and the sphere of institutions. The vocabulary will change, but the standards will be just as exacting in the interviews we read. To escape technocracy, the political educator will bring out what, in existing societies, already goes beyond the commensurable. These are the stakes of Ricoeur’s reflection on the heterogeneity of social goods and the differences between “spheres of justice” (Michael Walzer). At the very moment the Soviet bureaucracy is disappearing, Ricoeur warns against the appearance, at the heart of triumphant capitalism, of other forms of administrated powers. The false homogeneity of “tools” can, in fact, give the illusion of a self-regulating society in which choices are made by no one and as a result call for no confrontation. At this level, the intellectual’s responsibility is to reintroduce conflict. This key word in Ricoeur marks the philosopher’s contribution to the critique of technology and economics. Behind the production of machines and the apparently anonymous logic of growth, we find decisions taken in a conflictual context which has been repressed. The primary task of the political educator is to open up a space once more for democratic confrontation, where the will seems to have capitulated to the rationality of instruments.7
The second level is that of “institutions”; it concerns the principles presiding over the choice of the preferable (equality, liberty, justice). Once it is established that human creativity is at work even in the domains of technology and economics, the problem of the criteria for action is posed. In the pages that follow, we see the attempts to apply to concrete cases the distinctions Ricoeur has made in the field of action. In particular, the three levels of morality (the ethics of the good life, the deontology of norms, practical wisdom in situation) will help to shed light on the difficulties encountered in medicine (Chapter 11) or in international relations (Chapter 8). Here again, this pluralizing of viewpoints is a valuable contribution of the political educator. Ricoeur marks the limits of the procedural conceptions of the Rule of Law by examining the aporias generated by democracy. The moment of the institutions is fundamental because it organizes the confrontation without ever setting a definite end to it. Ricoeur’s strategy continues to be the “long detour”: the (modern) impossibility of a sharp decision among substantial conceptions of the good tends toward a culture of conflict. Without it, “le compromis” (genuine compromise) is inevitably lost to “la compromission” (compromising one’s values or character) (Chapter 7).
This twofold effort of conceptual clarification (on the level of technologies and on the level of institutions) is already part of the intellectual’s engagement. The intellectual’s vocation is not to express an opinion on “values,” as if his discourse were free of all historical responsibility. The 1965 article stresses this point, borrowing from Max Weber the distinction between the “ethics of responsibility” and “the ethics of conviction.” The intellectual’s engagement is not only a function of his freedom, it also stems from the fact of being always already caught up in a history in which the individual does not control all the parameters. His responsibility consists in exploring the “paradoxes of the political” rather than relying on certainties dictated by conscience.8 Is this to say that political education is limited to an appeal to realism justified by the necessities of power? Not at all. The political educator accomplishes his task only by recalling “the constant pressure that the ethics of conviction exercises on the ethics of responsibility.”9 The name of this pressure is “utopia”: this word is frequently pronounced in the interviews collected in this volume.10
As much as the social and institutional analysis proceeds through a variation of possibilities based on what already exists, to the same extent utopia allows a radically new possibility to appear. Its dimension is an exile outside of established political and economic orders. Ricoeur long advocated in favor of the concrete utopias at work, for example, in certain religious communities. These communities practice forms of association in the world that escape the logic of technological domination.11 Later, he will define utopia as a product of the social imagination that is opposed to ideology: ideology integrates action into a pre-existing social symbolism, while utopia claims a “nowhere,” in contrast with which ideologies appear in their contingency.12 As the collective expression of a constituting imaginary, utopia serves a subversive function. Responding to its call, a consciousness situated in a world of equipment and institutions becomes a consciousness of “nowhere.”
The political educator, in this way, divides this task between exploring a here and designating an elsewhere. To be sure, “we still perceive some islands of rationality, but we no longer have the means to situate them within an archipelago of unique and all-encompassing meanings” (p. 17). Just as there no longer exists a grand narrative to recapitulate the past, in the same way there is no longer any utopia capable of projecting the desired future. According to Ricoeur, what remains is human social creativity, which marks the source common to the institutional frameworks that are already present and the horizons that extend beyond them. The philosopher’s engagement lies in the promise to revive this source at the very moment it appears to dry up under the weight of the constraints of “the real.”
Michaël Foessel
Notes
1 1 See Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, tr. K. Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). “Life: A Story in Search of a Narrator,” in On Psychoanalysis, tr. D. Pellauer (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012).
2 2 See Paul Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, ed. G. Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
3