Philosophy, Ethics, and Politics. Paul Ricoeur
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role for me. Systematic mistrust had its Nietzschean and Freudian roots – Marxist too, but, curiously, I was never deeply disturbed by Marx. I did not see in him the power of disruption I found in Nietzsche or Freud. I was interested in Marx for other reasons: for the problem of ideology as a deceptive form of knowledge. My most recent book dealing with the relations between “ideology and utopia,”8 expresses quite well the crux of my relation to Marx, which is a rather tranquil relation, whereas I have always found Nietzsche more invigorating.
Finally, there was the “linguistic turn” leading you to take a closer interest in what is commonly termed “Anglo-Saxon philosophy.”
The linguistic turn for me was made inside of hermeneutics, because to reflect on myths is to remain within language. As I was frequently employing the notions of symbol and symbolism in my works on the symbolism of evil and on Freud, I realized that my own use of the word “symbol” lacked a linguistic foundation. I had to go back and start again from Saussure and, especially, from Benveniste: from the latter, I retained the notion of the irreducibility of discourse to the word, and so of the linguistics of the sentence to the linguistics of the sign. Concurrently, I was encountering analytical philosophy in its dual forms: the analysis of ordinary language, and the philosophy of well-constructed languages, logical languages. I always found solid support in the tradition of Austin, Strawson, etc., who started with what people say, with the idea that ordinary language contains an unbelievable wealth of meaning. This connection between phenomenology, linguistics, and analytical philosophy, in its least logicist aspect, gave me the resources of hybridization to which I owe so much. Analytical philosophy continues to fascinate me by its level of argumentation. This is what forces our respect: the choice of arguments, counterexamples, rejoinders. At times the object of analysis is slighter than the instrument of analysis: this is what we in France often perceive, we who have difficulty opening ourselves to this argumentative rigor. The flipside of this attitude is the professionalization of philosophical activity. I myself am somewhat of a victim of this effect: no longer writing for the general public, but writing for the greatest specialist in one’s discipline, the one you have to convince.
How is it that you have split your time between the United States and France? Is it the result of chance, or were there possibilities of work in the United States that attracted you?
You never know what is chance and what is fate. I have often been struck by the fact that the anecdotal becomes the necessary after the fact. When I returned from Germany after my captivity, looking for somewhere to regain my health, I taught for three years in Chambon-sur-Lignon in a small Protestant secondary school in the mountains, where pacifist American Quakers had come to the aid of French teachers and educators who had participated in non-violent resistance in aiding the Jews. The first time I visited the United States it was to a Quaker college. The Quakers were the first American link during the period of reconstruction within the small province of French Protestantism. Then I taught in New York until 1970, when I was appointed as a visiting professor to the Divinity School and the Philosophy Department of the University of Chicago. I have since divided my time, in the proportion of two thirds/one third, between France and the United States. I continue to teach there.
You have had university responsibilities in France. What are your thoughts in comparing the two university systems?
The comparison makes obvious first of all the poverty of the French system: it is just simply cruel. To be sure, in Chicago I taught in a very selective framework, with students in doctoral programs: one could have no more than twenty-five students at once, direct no more than five dissertations, etc. This is just in no way comparable to what I experienced at the Sorbonne, which, moreover, I had already left to go to Nanterre, before taking early retirement.
I had not been happy in that system for pedagogical reasons: it is a system that gives little credit to students, that does not afford them the means to do research. An American student has no more than twenty hours of class, while a French student often has a lot more, up to thirty-five hours in some disciplines. A student’s work consists in taking in the courses and regurgitating them; there is no engagement with the texts, with the library. This question really disturbs me: how is it possible that societies so similar in other ways, advanced industrial societies, can have produced such different systems of education? This is indisputably where the imprint of history is the strongest, to such an extent that our systems are practically incommunicable, even in Europe. Systems of education are the most difficult to reform. It is a paradox that a system of education is supposed to be the most forward looking, since by definition we are dealing with people who will be operational ten or twenty years later. Yet we have a tendency to teach as we were taught; there is something very regressive in the role of a teacher. In systems in which innovation is more highly prized, as in the American system, one is led to reflect more on one’s practice and to be creative, inventive. You can have a short seminar, a seminar where you never speak, a seminar where two or three people speak: anything is permitted, as long as the students show up.
You have been very active in the International Institute of Philosophy, and have served as its president. What role does this kind of institution play?
It is by invitation only: there are nine French philosophers, five English philosophers, nine Americans, etc., one hundred and ten or twenty members in all. Each year, the Institute holds a meeting on a rather technical subject; this year the theme will be: “signifying and understanding.” There is a clear Anglo-American slant, but also a strong Continental counterpart: Gadamer and Habermas for Germany, and, on the French side, Granger, who is rather close to the Anglo-American tradition, but also Aubenque and Levinas. This is a milieu of very high-level discussion, but also a meeting place, more so than the large international symposia. The international congresses of philosophy, held every five years, are open more widely, while the meetings of the Institute are more selective. But the Institute is also the only place where analytical philosophy, which tends to be dominant, at times contemptuous, accepts a reciprocal encounter. Conversely, here “Continental” philosophers have discovered the wide variety of so-called “analytical” philosophy and the possibilities of hybridization with so-called “Continental” philosophy. The marriage between Kantian transcendentalism and Anglo-Saxon pragmatism, which is evidenced for example in Habermas’s work, is in this respect a very important cultural event, one that is not, however, without pitfalls as it tends to construct an American-German bridge above our heads. From this standpoint, I am not convinced that ruminating over the Heideggerian heritage is the best way to maintain contact with the Germanic world in order to keep it from completely tipping over into the American universe. German thought, moreover, suffers from certain defects it shares with French thought: the recourse to history, the endless recapitulation of the tradition (Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel), with which people like Habermas and Luhmann have broken, being less overwhelmed by the historical tradition than we are. I don’t say this negatively, for there is always the risk, on the other side, of a thought lacking memory.
Bloom, it seems, charged Rawls with a lack of education.9 French philosophy, however, has difficulty exiting two impasses: rereading the classics, with the intent, to be sure, of understanding them better and better; and, on the other hand, an inability to take on new subjects. The question is endlessly posed whether philosophy is dead, whether philosophy is possible for itself; one cannot endlessly do the philosophy of philosophy, but must move beyond this to think about something, breaking with this aspect of commentary and marginal notation, even in the strong sense that Derrida has given to the word “margin,” but which always amounts to writing in the margin of the greats.
And yet, this was the intention of phenomenology at the outset?
Indeed, it was a matter of placing oneself before specific objects and phenomena in order to ask oneself on a domain-specific basis about ways of positing something, without positivism. The lack of concern for ways of positing things disturbs me in contemporary French philosophy: it leaves the field open for an epistemology that adopts what others have posited. A glaring example of this today is Granger, who declares that philosophy has no object, only sciences have an object.10 I believe that we have to rediscover an object. For example: what