Philosophy, Ethics, and Politics. Paul Ricoeur
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Rawls affirms that justice is the virtue of institutions. In this way, there is an irreducibility of the phenomenon of institutions: the rules of living together are derivable neither from the self-positing of a subject – and from this standpoint one is right to invoke Levinas – nor from the injunction in the second person. I should like to connect the reciprocity in the distribution of tasks and roles to the notion of “each one”: the institution distributes roles and, in this way, engenders the “each one.” But the operator of distribution is other than these roles. We rediscover Levinas’s third party and even the Old Testament: the widow and the orphan Levinas speaks of. I do not necessarily know the widow and the orphan, they are social situations. In tribal societies, the widow was someone whose husband left no brother to marry her, and so someone who could not be taken back into the system of kinship. This is the very model of the third party, the faceless par excellence. It is to them that we have a duty of justice. Insofar as tribal rules function, there is no need to raise the problem of justice. Things have not fundamentally changed. Today as well, there are those who are left out of the distribution. What should astonish us, however, is that we believe that they have a right. What is the basis of this right, if not the fact, not always perceptible, that these are persons? For this, we need concepts of capacity, of disposition, which, once again, are concepts belonging to an anthropology, putting into play ontological resources such as dynamis, energeia.
When you say there is something here to be thought, is this also a matter of public intervention? Should the philosopher intervene in the public debate?
Yes, although the appropriate place is not always the political scene in the narrow sense, but instead in places like associations, for it is a matter of reconstructing a civil society that does not coincide with the political society. With respect to the fourth world, local action is most effective. To recall Edgar Morin’s analyses, we are confronting a social object that is much more complex than all the models we could apply to it in order to change it: we must describe the complex object, but intervene where we are. Global strategies have too wide a mesh; we need more narrowly targeted strategies, based on neighborhood relations, etc. There are resources of generosity still slumbering that have to be awakened by playing on passions that are good passions.
Notes
1 1 Interview with Joël Roman and Étienne Tassin, “A quoi pensent les philosophes?,” Autrement, November 1988.
2 2 Mikel Dufrenne and Paul Ricoeur, Karl Jaspers et la philosophie de l’existence (Paris: Le Seuil, 1947).
3 3 Karl Jaspers, The Great Philosophers, tr. R. Manheim (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962).
4 4 Karl Jaspers, Von der Wahrheit (Munich: Piper, 1947).
5 5 Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, tr. J. N. Findlay (London: Routledge, 1973).
6 6 Edmund Husserl, Ideen, French translation by Paul Ricoeur, Idées directrices pour une phénoménologie pure (Paris: Gallimard, 1950). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy – First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, tr. F. Kersten (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1982).
7 7 Paul Ricoeur, De l’interprétation. Essai sur Freud (Paris: Le Seuil, 1965). Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, tr. D. Savage (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1970). See also Le Conflit des interprétations. Essais d’herméneutique I (Paris: Le Seuil, 1969). The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974).
8 8 Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia.
9 9 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971). Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987).
10 10 Gilles-Gaston Granger, Pour la connaissance philosophique (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1988).
11 11 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, La Fiction du politique (Paris: Bourgois, 1988). Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, tr. C. Turner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).
2. Sketch of a Plea for the Capable Human Being1
ARNAUD SPIRE: You have expressed on many occasions your reservations regarding attempts to explain a philosophical work by the life of its author. Do you think that a body of work like yours speaks for itself?
PAUL RICOEUR: That is a reader’s point of view, which does not entirely correspond with my own. I am aware instead of the fragmentary character of my philosophical work. Each of my books gravitates around a well-determined question. A chronological approach can be justified to the extent that each work develops out of questions unresolved in the preceding one. Here is an example. The Symbolism of Evil, the second part of volume two of my Philosophy of the Will,2 comes out of an unresolved question in the first volume that concerned the voluntary and the involuntary, where I speak of a sort of “innocent will,” that is to say, a will for which the question of good and evil does not arise. The history of humanity, of peoples, however, is profoundly marked by evil in the form of violence, lies, and oppression. The fact that this appears nowhere in a philosophy of the “voluntary” in opposition to the “involuntary” appeared untenable to me. So, I then approached the theme by way of the myths that recount how evil came into the world – in particular, by way of those myths at the origin of Western culture. Interpretations of these symbols and grand narratives already existed. In this way, I was confronted by readings of the origin of evil opposed to my own, by those I called the “philosophers of suspicion.” I considered the interpretations of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche to be reductive, in the sense that, by reduction, they take us “back behind.” I mean reduction to the economic and social foundation in Marx, reduction to instincts in Freud, and reduction to the will to life and to the depths of desire in Nietzsche. All these reductions conflicted with the amplifying interpretations opening toward a sort of sacred horizon.
In short, according to you, whether in Marx, Freud, or Nietzsche, evil is conceived in a reductive manner, since in each case evil is reduced to a single cause. On the other hand, you have developed a conception of evil that is plural and multiform.
The notion of the conflict of interpretations concerns both sides of the opposition. It is not a matter of replacing a conception of evil that is too material or too instinctual with a conception that is more spiritual. The conflict of interpretations gives both sides their due. It is, moreover, a general feature of my work that I always place myself at a crossroad of conflict. I try to move beyond what can be paralyzing in a position that oscillates between two poles, and it is in this sense that each of my books generally takes up what was left unresolved in the preceding one. This forms a chain that is half-chronological, half-dialectical. I never seek a middle or intermediary path. I simply place emphasis on the creativity that language carries. In this, I participated in the “linguistic turn” common to all schools of philosophy in the 1960s and 1970s. At the same time, I transposed the conflict of interpretations into a new framework of reflection, which allowed me to see both sides of the question – the regressive side, which indeed seems to me to be the ground of the human imagination, as well as the prospective side. The human imagination includes both the side one could term nostalgic, and the side one could call prophetic.
That is when I began to deal with the problem of metaphor, which is, to begin with, the problem of replacing an ordinary word with a word that produces an image. Formulated in this way, the topic appears to be limited to the functioning of poetic language. But it seemed to me that metaphor was the focal point of creativity in language. Through this work, I tried to show that language is not simply an instrument employed to satisfy the basic needs of ordinary conversation, nor is it reducible to scientific language, but is amazingly revelatory of the hidden face of things and of aspects buried deep within our experience. Poetic language thus breaks with ordinary language, and even with scientific language. It is not a descriptive language that tells us about reality, rather poetic language reveals aspects of the habitable world that are concealed, as it were, by everydayness