Philosophy, Ethics, and Politics. Paul Ricoeur
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Do you mean that it is an instrument that goes beyond its instrumentality?
Oh yes! In this regard, I am opposed to another type of reduction, with which I reproach the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger: to have narrowed scientific language to its technological applications, as if technology had swallowed up science! The totally disinterested character of science must be affirmed, in contrast to the instrumental character of technology. And this does not prevent scientific language from “saying” the world under two conditions: the first is conformity with respect to what is observed, the second is conformity with respect to logical coherence. These two rules, observation and coherence, are violated by poetic language, thereby exploding language. In short, I tried to tie the revelatory character of poetic language to its subversive aspect. Scientific language has its logical discipline, and even its ethical discipline. Its demand for rigor grounds the standards proper to it. Poetry is language in festive mode; it expresses aspects of the world and of my participation in the world that I would never have perceived without the profusion and the somewhat delirious character of poetic language. This question was at the core of my book The Rule of Metaphor [La Métaphore vive].3 The adjective “living [vif]” is truly important, inasmuch as our everyday language is a huge cemetery of dead metaphors. In this way, the “leg” of a chair or the “saddle” of a mountain pass are no longer metaphors perceived to break with ordinary language, but have been integrated into it. The poet, I would say, is the guardian of metaphors inconvertible into ordinary language.
Time and Narrative is the work that is twin to The Rule of Metaphor. In it, you widen the scope of the creativity of language to the narrative and to its plot, and no longer confine it to metaphor alone. By extending your area of investigation to all texts that are susceptible to multiple interpretations, haven’t you broached the idea that all things human go beyond their simple material existence?
The plurality of meanings is characteristic of basically all language that is not strictly descriptive or logical. In Time and Narrative – second to be born, but conceived at the same time – I considered another side of the creativity of human language: no longer the lyrical side, but the narrative side. My idea was that the construction of plots in the narrative domain displayed the same creative capacity as the invention of metaphors in the lyrical domain. There is thus a parallel between the creative power of metaphor and that of the plot in the narrative domain. This, of course, took me much further than I had foreseen, because the narrative does not simply concern the epic, tragedy, or the novel but also the field of history. I tried to defend the idea that the art of recounting covers a range of narratives extending from fairytales to grand historical narration. Having arrived at this point, my work took off in a new direction. I tried to group together all these approaches and asked myself, in a recapitulative mode in Oneself as Another, what had become of the subject in all this. I attempted to link together the speaking subject, the acting subject, the narrating subject, the moral subject, and the political subject. Who speaks? Who acts? Who recounts? Who is responsible? Who is the political subject? In this way, I came to the idea that the only one who can pose the question “who?” in all other domains is the one who can be a citizen-subject.
I continue to think that your thought eludes any chronological exposition. From History and Truth, first appearing in 1955, to Oneself as Another, published in 1990, Olivier Mongin, the most recent of your biographers, asserts that for you, meaning “sacrificed on the altar of history … has again become a wager.”4 You have added the work of mourning with respect to the history of the subject to the work of mourning with respect to meaning. Have you not always, and at first just in anticipation, questioned whether one can, at the same time, understand past history and make current history without giving in to the systematizing spirit of philosophies of history?
There is certainly a first level, the level of the history one suffers and of the history one makes. By this juxtaposition I mean to say that I have never abandoned Marx’s formula that man makes history under conditions he has not made. This aspect of the participation in history, at once active and passive, is constitutive of the human being as historical. An historical being is one who, at one and the same time, suffers and makes history. This being thereby creates its identity in this twofold relation. The history of historians lies on another level. What degree of truth can it claim? This history can itself be viewed on several levels. To begin with, there is a basic documentary stage, then a level of national, economic, and political history, as well as the history of “mentalities.” The third level, that of “grand narratives,” raises the question of whether one can consider the entire history of humanity to be meaningful. I dealt with this conception in a chapter of Time and Narrative, Volume 3, to which I gave the title “Should We Renounce Hegel?” It is true that we live in a period today that is profoundly marked by the suspension of a global view. This is especially true since the end of the Cold War and the end of the great bipolar political framework that still had the appearance of rationality. I recall, in this regard, a remark by one of my historian friends, saying goodbye to his research center on the history of the present: “If the nineteenth century recognized the category of ‘the ruse of reason,’ in the twentieth century we have instead been introduced to the category of ‘the surprise of history.’” I also think that we are much more aware of indeterminacy, which has perhaps always existed, but was relatively well masked by the grand visions, the grand syntheses of history. 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. This justifies, I think, taking a position that emphasizes morality and the will. In the absence of a meaning that is given and all-encompassing, it is necessary to project a meaning that we derive from our moral ground: justice, equality, the struggle against oppression. We live in a period when, for lack of a given historical sense, it is by means of a self-imposed moral sense that we can take over from the great philosophies of history. This is the responsibility of the philosopher. It is no longer the province of a teleology (a vision of the world organized in view of an end), but of a deontology (a set of ethical rules following from the positing of a subject).
In this passage from one problematic to the other, what is the place of the “work of mourning”?
In History and Truth, after the events in Budapest in 1956, I added a text titled “The Political Paradox.”5 It is not by chance that in a book called History and Truth a third term appears – precisely the political – understood as the site of a major conflict between the meaning which is given by the form of the legal State and the violence that remains in every State as such. This is where the deep-seated irrationality of all power resides. In my work, the notion of the paradox of the political takes the place of the meaning of history, which was believed to contain a supra-moral injunction. It is on this basis that, for Hegel, we carry out the mourning, in the sense of the “work of mourning.” It is not a matter of lamentation, but of moving toward the future. In performing this work of mourning, we show we are capable of surviving the objects lost.
Can Oneself as Another be considered a sort of completion? Hadn’t your intention been to extend the reach of Husserl’s phenomenology (a philosophical discourse organized around phenomena) into French philosophy in the form of a philosophy of action? May I indicate the new philosophical dimension that results from this, narrowing it to the generalized effort to replace the formidable pair “question-response,” with a new pair “call-response”?
The organizing principle of Oneself as Another is the idea of the acting and suffering human being, or as I sometimes say, the capable human being. This is a being capable of speaking, capable of acting, capable of promising, one whose actions can be coordinated with values one has given to oneself (values potentially ascribable to oneself and to an other than the self). To my mind, this notion of the capable human being has become absolutely central, because it allows me to link together, on the one hand, what could be called an anthropology – a kind of general description of what it is to be a human being – and, on the other hand, a morality, inasmuch as a human being is essentially worthy of respect to the extent that I discern in that being the capacity to be himself or herself. From this standpoint, I adopt as the first maxim of my action: any other life,