Ricoeur’s Thought

There are philosophical systems that are particularly well-organized, at the limits of completion like that of Hegel. All the concepts interlock there. They lock themselves almost into articulations as meticulous and learned as a Swiss watch freed forever from the need for man to wind its mechanism. There are also philosophies of “proximity”: Marc Aurelius, Seneca, Montaigne deliver to us daily, maxims and reflections capable of helping us, if need be, to live from sunrise onwards a happy existence and to approach a happiness as peaceful as it is modest. And then there is Ricoeur’s thought. Far from being trapped between the two previous models, it searches indefinitely, at the limits of an obsession, for the elsewhere, the other. A philosopher, Paul Ricoeur certainly is, given that his work is inscribed in the traditional register of a “fundamental interrogation” on being. But the philosopher obstinately refuses to lock himself into a purely speculative spiral: he borrows side paths and goes forth gathering the flowers of intellectual neighborhood. Far from being a mere pollen thief, he instead makes honey from a fruitful dialogue with history, sociology, politics, phenomenology, but also psychoanalysis, art and Christian theology. Courageous originality and assured richness of his reflection.

In this research, boundaries will probably have fascinated him more than the atomic core. An example? The human being whom Paul Ricoeur frees from his “finitude” in favor of a “fallible acting”. This “Eros by which we are in being,” he affirms with insistence in “Finitude and Guilt,” places man in the dynamic position of an intermediary. Comparable to the Greek metaxu, to the in-between, it serves in a way as mediation like the transitional joint uniting the white square to the black square in a mosaic tile. Fragility certainly of this “median” but guaranteed in equal measure with a form of freedom: man transcends life and death through narration, the account of an experience which, like Aeschylus, opens the doors of knowledge to him, but assures him moreover, according to Ricoeur, those of eternity by inscribing him definitively in time. Boundaries and interpretations again and again in this philosopher through the use of a wide array of languages, ancient or living, which he conceives as a voyage into the immense “plurality” of humanity. And let us not forget, within this Ricoeur thought, certain of his quasi-prophetic ideas. It is certainly not the least of the interests of the journal Esprit to have inserted texts, some of them unpublished, in this special issue devoted to the philosopher who died in 2005. In a report presented in 1958 to the “Congress of Social Christianity,” he was already announcing, in that form of Augustinian prescience that he perhaps would not have disowned, the future ills of modern society: “It seems,” he explained, “that the reduction of physical pain is paid for by the appearance of an evil of a new kind, an evil of insignificance, made of worthlessness and monotony, an evil of boredom, more psychological than the evil of painfulness.” Clairvoyance of a philosophy imbued with humanitude but a mixing of genres probably too suspect to have been heard and understood in time.

Journal Esprit, March-April 2006, 380 p., 20 Euros.

Jean-Luc Vannier
Psychoanalyst

Jlvannier@free.fr Tel: 06 16 52 55 20