The French philosopher whose hermeneutic phenomenology integrated existentialist, structuralist, psychoanalytic, and analytic resources into a comprehensive philosophy of human action, narrative, and selfhood, and whose Time and Narrative and Oneself as Another are among the major works of late twentieth-century continental philosophy.
ricoeur
French philosopher (1913–2005), professor at Strasbourg, Paris-Sorbonne, Paris-Nanterre, and the University of Chicago, whose hermeneutical phenomenology engaged Freud, structuralism, biblical exegesis, and analytic philosophy to produce comprehensive philosophical anthropologies of will, evil, language, narrative, selfhood, memory, and recognition.
Life
Jean Paul Gustave Ricoeur was born on 27 February 1913 in Valence, France, into a Protestant family. His mother died in childbirth seven months later; his father was killed in the First World War at the Battle of the Marne in 1915. Ricoeur and his sister were raised by their paternal grandparents in Rennes; the early experience of double parental loss shaped, by his own later reflection, his philosophical preoccupation with the fragility of human life and the role of memory in constituting personal identity.
He studied philosophy at the University of Rennes, completing his licence in 1933 and his agrégation in 1935. He taught philosophy at provincial lycées (Saint-Brieuc 1933–35, Colmar 1935–39) before being mobilized at the outbreak of war. He was captured at the fall of France in May 1940 and spent the next five years as a prisoner of war in Pomerania.
The POW years were intellectually formative. The senior officer of Ricoeur's camp, the philosopher Mikel Dufrenne, organized a camp university in which Ricoeur and others taught courses to fellow prisoners; Ricoeur lectured on Husserl, Karl Jaspers, and Gabriel Marcel — the three philosophers who shaped his early thought. During the captivity he translated Husserl's Ideas I into French (the translation was published in 1950, with extensive Ricoeur commentary, and became the standard French Ideen). The prisoner-of-war years are documented in the joint Ricoeur-Dufrenne Karl Jaspers et la philosophie de l'existence (1947).
After the war Ricoeur taught at the Collège Cévenol (a private Protestant secondary school in southern France, with a wartime history of sheltering Jewish refugees) from 1945 to 1948, then was appointed to chairs successively at the University of Strasbourg (1948–56), the Sorbonne (1956–67), and the University of Paris-Nanterre (1967–80). The Nanterre years included Ricoeur's deanship during the 1968 student protests and the bitter aftermath that effectively ended his comfortable French academic career; from the early 1970s he held a permanent visiting appointment at the University of Chicago Divinity School (the John Nuveen Chair), which he held until his retirement in 1991. The Chicago years gave him sustained engagement with American analytic philosophy and with the American theological tradition.
The public honors of the late career were extensive: the Hegel Prize (1985), the Karl Jaspers Prize (1989), the Balzan Prize (1999), the Kyoto Prize (2000), the Library of Congress's John W. Kluge Prize (2004, the first awarded). Ricoeur died on 20 May 2005 at his home in Châtenay-Malabry, near Paris, aged 92.
The Philosophical Project
Ricoeur's lifelong project was a philosophical anthropology of the capable human being (l'homme capable) — a comprehensive account of human life as the life of an agent who can speak, act, narrate, take responsibility, suffer, and remember. The project unfolded across more than thirty books and hundreds of essays, through phases of distinct topical focus.
The early phase (through the 1960s) developed the philosophy of the will: Freedom and Nature (1950, the first volume) treats the structures of voluntary action against an existentialist-phenomenological background; Fallible Man (1960) develops the conditions of human fallibility; The Symbolism of Evil (1960) treats the symbolic forms (stain, sin, guilt; the myths of evil's origin) through which human consciousness has articulated the experience of evil. The early work is recognizably phenomenological-existentialist in framework but distinctive in its sustained attention to the symbolic mediations of consciousness.
The middle phase (1960s–80s) developed the hermeneutic turn. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (1965) is one of the major mid-twentieth-century philosophical engagements with psychoanalysis, integrating Freudian interpretation with the broader theory of interpretation. The Conflict of Interpretations (1969) and The Rule of Metaphor (1975) develop the hermeneutic framework systematically. The Ricoeurian distinction between the hermeneutics of suspicion (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud: interpretation as unmasking) and the hermeneutics of restoration (the religious-phenomenological tradition: interpretation as listening to the saying of the text) has been continuously absorbed into broader humanistic and theological discussion.
Time and Narrative
Temps et récit (three volumes, 1983–85) is Ricoeur's masterwork of the mature middle period. The work treats the relation between the philosophical aporias of time and the structures of narrative — the way in which narrative form, in both historical and fictional registers, articulates the experience of time that pure philosophical analysis cannot adequately treat.
The central thesis: the philosophical analysis of time (from Augustine through Husserl and Heidegger) generates aporias — the apparent contradictions in the structure of past-present-future, of the relation between cosmic and lived time — that philosophical analysis itself cannot resolve. Narrative form does what philosophical analysis cannot: by employing the resources of emplotment (the configuration of discrete events into a connected whole that proceeds from a beginning through a middle to an end), narrative articulates time in a way that integrates the otherwise irreducible dimensions of human temporal experience.
The argument proceeds through detailed engagements with Augustine's Confessions XI, Aristotle's Poetics, the major nineteenth-century novel (Mann's Magic Mountain, Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, Proust's Recherche), and twentieth-century historical-philosophical thought (Bloch, Braudel, Hayden White). The work is the most extensive philosophical treatment of narrative produced in the twentieth century and has shaped subsequent work in literary theory, philosophy of history, and theological hermeneutics.
Oneself as Another
Soi-même comme un autre (1990, the 1986 Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh) is the systematic statement of Ricoeur's late philosophy of selfhood. The book's central distinction: between idem-identity (sameness, the identity of a substance that persists unchanged through time) and ipse-identity (selfhood, the identity of an agent who maintains himself or herself across time through commitments, projects, promises, and the narrative integration of a life). The classic philosophical accounts of personal identity (Locke, Hume, the contemporary analytic literature) have largely treated personal identity in idem terms; Ricoeur argues for the ipse dimension as irreducibly important and as requiring a hermeneutical-narrative philosophical framework rather than a substance-metaphysical one.
The book's ten studies treat in order: the linguistic dimension of selfhood (referring to oneself in speech), the praxic dimension (acting), the narrative dimension (telling one's life), and the ethical dimension (taking responsibility for oneself and others). The ninth study treats the ethical aim that runs through the others: "aiming at the good life with and for others in just institutions" — the formula of Ricoeur's mature ethics that integrates Aristotelian eudaimonia, Kantian universalist morality, and the institutional conditions of just political community.
The book is widely regarded as the major French philosophical treatment of selfhood in the second half of the twentieth century and as one of the principal contemporary alternatives to both Anglophone analytic theories of personal identity and post-structuralist dissolutions of the subject.
Memory, History, Forgetting
The late book La mémoire, l'histoire, l'oubli (2000) treats the relations among memory, historical knowledge, and forgetting in three parts. The book engages contemporary historiographical debates (around the Annales school, the Historikerstreit, the politics of memory in postwar Europe), the cognitive and philosophical analysis of memory, and the political and ethical question of how communities should handle traumatic pasts (the Holocaust, the colonial wars, the Latin American dictatorships). The treatment is one of the major recent philosophical engagements with the question of how history and memory should and should not be related.
Reception
Ricoeur's reception has been substantial in both Francophone and Anglophone philosophy, in theology (particularly Protestant biblical hermeneutics and Catholic philosophical theology), and in the broader humanities. The early work was the principal alternative to Sartrean existentialism in French Protestant philosophy of the 1950s and 1960s. The middle hermeneutic work made Ricoeur the principal French interlocutor of the Anglo-American philosophical and theological hermeneutic tradition. The late work has secured Ricoeur's status as one of the major continental philosophers of the late twentieth century.
The principal English-language interpreters include Don Ihde, David Pellauer, Charles Reagan (whose 1996 Paul Ricoeur: His Life and Work is the standard biography), Richard Kearney, John B. Thompson, David Stewart, Mark Wallace, and Bernard Dauenhauer. The Fonds Ricoeur, established at the Faculté de théologie protestante de Paris in 2010, maintains the Ricoeur archive and supports continuing scholarly work. The complete works edition (planned in 30 volumes under the editorship of Jean Greisch and others, in progress) will be the standard scholarly reference.
Significance
Ricoeur's importance has three dimensions. As hermeneutic phenomenologist, his synthesis of Husserlian-Heideggerian phenomenology with the broader interpretive tradition (biblical, psychoanalytic, structuralist, analytic) produced the most comprehensive late twentieth-century French philosophical hermeneutics. As philosopher of selfhood, Oneself as Another and the surrounding works supplied the major contemporary alternative to both substance-metaphysical and post-structuralist accounts of the self. As philosophical anthropologist of the capable human being, the lifelong project of integrating the multiple dimensions of human capacity — to speak, to act, to narrate, to suffer, to remember — constitutes one of the most comprehensive late twentieth-century systematic philosophical undertakings.