## 1. Biographical Sketch



Paul Ricoeur was born on February 27, 1913 in Valence, France. His
mother died shortly thereafter and his father was killed in the Battle
of the Marne in 1915, so Ricoeur and his sister were reared by their
paternal grandparents and an unmarried aunt in Rennes. They were
devout members of the French Reformed Protestant tradition. He was
later to speak of the role of faith in his life as "an accident
transformed into a destiny through an ongoing choice, while
scrupulously respecting other choices." As a war orphan his
schooling was paid for by the French government. He studied philosophy
first at the University of Rennes and then at the Sorbonne. From the
earliest years of his academic life he was convinced that there is a
basic, irreducible difference between things and human beings as
persons and as agents. Unlike things, persons can engage in free,
thoughtful action. But Ricoeur never accepted any version of a
substance dualism in the person as the Cartesian *cogito* and
the Kantian transcendental subject can be read to require. He did,
however, accept Kant's doctrine regarding the antinomies of
reason and the necessary distinction between theoretical and practical
reason. Ricoeur was studying in Germany when World War II broke out.
Soon after being called up for service in the French army in 1939 he
was captured and spent the rest of the war in prison camps in Germany.
There he was able to study the work of Karl Jaspers and to prepare a
translation of Husserl's *Ideas I* in the margins of the
book which he had to conceal from his jailers. After the war, he
completed his doctorate and was appointed lecturer, then professor of
the history of philosophy at the University of Strasbourg, where he
succeeded Jean Hyppolite. He remained there until 1956, when he was
named to the chair of general philosophy at the Sorbonne. In 1965, he
joined the faculty of the new University of Paris at Nanterre, now
Paris X, whose establishment he had supported in light of the rapid
growth in the number of university students at that time. He served a
difficult year as Dean of the faculty of letters following the student
uprising of 1968. Except for three years he then spent at Louvain, he
continued to teach a seminar at the Husserl Archive in Paris until he
reached the mandatory retirement age in 1980. From 1954 on, Ricoeur
also lectured regularly in the United States and Canada. In 1970 he
was named to succeed Paul Tillich as the John Nuveen professor of
philosophical theology at the University of Chicago, with a joint
appointment in the Divinity School, the Philosophy Department, and the
Committee on Social Thought. He taught there regularly for a portion
of each year until 1992. In 1986 he gave the Gifford Lectures in
Edinburgh, Scotland. Ricoeur's work has been translated into
more than twenty-five languages and he was honored by a volume in the
*Library of Living Philosophers* series. Among his many
honorary doctorates are ones from Chicago (1967), Northwestern (1977),
Columbia (1981), Gottingen (1987), and McGill (1992). He was the
recipient of numerous awards, among them the Hegel Prize (Stuttgart,
1985), the Dante Prize (Florence, 1988), the Karl Jaspers Prize
(Heidelberg, 1989), the Leopold Lucas Prize (Tubingen, 1990), the
French Academy Grand Prize for Philosophy (1991), the Kyoto Prize
(2000), and the Pope Paul VI International Prize (2003). In 2004, he
was co-recipient of the John W. Kluge Prize in the Human Sciences
awarded by the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress.


## 2. Pre-hermeneutic Anthropology



Ricoeur's first major work was meant to appear in three volumes
that would lay out a philosophy of the will starting from an eidetic
phenomenology of the voluntary and the involuntary. The second volume
would then turn to questions dealing with the empirical reality of the
will. The third volume would address the misuse of the will and the
existence of evil which cannot be explained through either a pure
phenomenology of the will or its empirical existence. The projected
third volume was announced as intending to present what Ricoeur called
a poetics of the will and a vision of innocence in light of what
Ricoeur, following Karl Jaspers, called Transcendence. This latter
volume never appeared. It was delayed, then set aside when Ricoeur
discovered new problems he had not foreseen and when he sought to
respond to new challenges to philosophy coming especially from
structuralism.



The first volume of this projected trilogy, *Freedom and Nature:
The Voluntary and the Involuntary* (1950), proposes a
phenomenology of the will, while bracketing the reality of evil. It
draws on the method of phenomenology developed by Edmund Husserl. In
it one finds an expression of a theme central to Ricoeur's
anthropology, namely, the polar subjective/objective character of the
constituent features of lived human existence. Contrary to
Sartre's claim that there is radical difference between
consciousness (or the for-itself) and materiality (or the in-itself),
a difference that pits the freedom of the for-itself against the sheer
facticity of the in-itself, Ricoeur argues that the voluntary and
involuntary dimensions of human existence are complementary. This can
be seen through a phenomenological description of the three structures
that constitute the voluntary pole of human existence: deciding,
choosing and moving to action, and our necessary consent to the
involuntary as that which is acted upon through our will, whose organ
is our body. There is no seamless harmony between these dimensions of
what is finally a finite freedom. Human beings have to struggle with
the tension between them and ultimately to consent to their embodied
lives and the world as something they do not fully create. It is the
always fragile resolution of this conflict that ultimately makes human
freedom genuinely human, and that gives us our distinctive identities
both as individuals and as members of larger historical communities
and ultimately of humanity.



Ricoeur extends his account of freedom to take up the topic of evil in
*Fallible Man* and *The Symbolism of Evil,* both
published in 1960. In these works he addresses the question of how to
account for the fact that it is possible for us to misuse our freedom,
a question that had been bracketed in the initial phenomenological
volume. In *Fallible Man* he argues through a transcendental
analysis that this possibility is grounded in the basic disproportion
that characterizes human existence as located between the finite,
perspectival nature of experience and the infinite, rational
dimensions of taking up that experience in perception, practice, and
feeling, leading to the concept of fallibility. This disproportion
shows up in every aspect of human existence, from perceiving to
feeling to thinking. It is evident in the human desire for
possessions, power, and prestige. By reason of this disproportion, we
are never wholly at one with ourselves and hence we can go wrong. We
are fallible, yet evil, the misuse of our freedom, is neither original
nor necessary, only always possible.



Nor does this disproportion render our existence meaningless. Rather,
the very disproportion that makes us fallible and makes human evil
doing possible is also what makes goodness, knowledge, and achievement
possible. It is what distinguishes us from one another--each one
of us has his or her unique spatiotemporal location and perspective
but we can know ourselves as one human among many and we can seek to
know the world beyond our individual perspective on it. Our
fallibility also makes it necessary and possible for us to communicate
with each other through our use of the *logos* which seeks to
transcend our localized points of view.



Though the unity of humanity is never more than a unity founded on
communication, precisely because we can communicate, the differences
among us are never absolute. Furthermore, no one of us alone could be
a person. Though each of us has an individual identity, our identities
show that we are bound up with others: "Man is this plural and
collective unity in which the unity of destination and the differences
of destinies are to be understood through each other"
(*Fallible Man*, 138).



The kind of unity that binds people to one another even though they
differ is found in their desire for esteem and recognition. This
desire seeks genuine mutuality that expresses esteem for the worth
that each of us has by reason of both our common humanity and our
individual uniqueness. This esteem positively values the disproportion
constitutive of every person. This theme of mutual recognition is
developed more fully in Ricoeur's final book *The Course of
Recognition*, where he argues that it goes beyond mere reciprocal
recognition, like that found in commercial or other transactions
reducible to an exchange of goods with no regard for who the other
party involved might be.



The study of history which acknowledges the temporality of our
existence confirms our desire for such mutual esteem. Such attention
to history, in turn, further clarifies the finite nature of human
freedom. For Ricoeur, there is an order and structure to history
conveyed through the narrating of history. Otherwise history would be
unintelligible. But this narrated history also recounts events and
deeds that disrupt the prevailing order and reorder it, leading to the
question whether forgiveness for the wrongs that have occurred and
debts that have been incurred might be possible, however difficult to
achieve.



These reflections reinforced Ricoeur's conviction that what
humans say and do presupposes both a finite freedom that allows us to
intervene in natural processes and a dependence on these same
processes for the efficacy of such actions. What we say and do would
be meaningless if it did not fit into some antecedent structure or
pattern established by natural processes, on the one hand, and into
what we say about such doings which intervene in those processes, on
the other. Our words and deeds are intended to express the meaning of
what exists, if only because they give meaning to things as they now
stand. In this sense, our words and deeds get their significance from
being responses to contexts not wholly of our own making. What we say
and do in such contexts can also aim beyond things as they now stand
and sometimes does give expression to new meanings and values, as well
as to unintended and as yet unrealized possibilities. In a word, our
exercising of our finite freedom has worth and efficacy only by reason
of our embodiment in a natural and cultural setting that is largely
not of our own making, but this is a world that we seek to appropriate
through our words and deeds--and our use of a productive
imagination.



Ricoeur saw that this conception of the disproportion that
characterizes human beings was insufficient to account for actual
occurrence of a bad will and evil deeds. No direct, unmediated
inspection of the cogito, like that he saw in Descartes and Husserl,
can show why these evils, contingent as each of them is, in fact came
to be. Recognizing the opacity of the cogito in this respect confirmed
his belief that all self-understanding comes about only through
"signs deposited in memory and imagination by the great literary
traditions" (Ricoeur, "Intellectual Autobiography",
in Hahn 1995: 16). This conclusion was a major motivator for his
hermeneutic and, at the same time, "linguistic turn".



Ricoeur next explored the problem of how then to account for the
existence of evil and its possible solution in *The Symbolism of
Evil*. There, he argued that we should consider how people have
sought to come to terms with their inability to make sense of the
existence of evil by using language that draws on the great symbols
and myths that speak of its origin and end. This is language that
conveys more than a single meaning, language that can always be
understood in more than one way; hence it needs always to be
interpreted. This study concluded by saying that philosophy must learn
to make sense of such language and learn to think starting from it,
something Ricoeur summed up in a famous phrase: "the symbol
gives rise to thought" (*The Symbolism of Evil*, 1967:
247-57). If philosophy is to take seriously this lesson taught
by reflection on the symbolism of evil, it has to take up the problem
of the "fullness of language". This means considering
those uses of language that extend beyond a single word or sentence,
as well as those which cannot be interpreted as simple logical
propositions that say S is P. Like the primary symbols of
evil-stain, sin, and guilt--these are forms of discourse
that can have more than one meaning. To make sense of the fullness of
language, therefore, philosophy has to develop a theory of
interpretation since actual discourse is not always, if ever univocal
and its meanings do change over time when acts of discourse outlive
the speakers and situations in which they were originally
produced.



In working out this theory of interpretation in terms of a theory of
language as discourse, Ricoeur saw that what he now called the
hermeneutic field to which interpretations applied was itself divided
internally between an approach such as that used in *The Symbolism
of Evil* which sought to recover meaning that was assumed to be
already there and what he now called a hermeneutics of suspicion, like
that found in Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, which held that nothing
ultimately means what it first seems to say. The rise of structuralism
in the 1960s and 70s, drawing on developments in linguistics,
contributed to this emphasis on suspicion by holding that it was an
underlying impersonal structure or structures that gave rise to the
apparent surface meaning. Structuralism also introduced the idea that
the identifying of such underlying structures could count as a
reductive explanation of any surface-level meaning. Ricoeur's
philosophical project therefore turned to showing that while
structuralism could be incorporated as a method of inquiry--look
for and learn from the proposed generative structures--it went
astray when it proposed itself as a theory of objectivity without
subjectivity, what Ricoeur called a transcendental philosophy without
a transcendental subject. Over time, he came to see that this limiting
of structural analysis to a method of interpretation can be shown to
follow from the fact that structuralists always presupposed the
surface meaning they were trying to explain away. Moreover, because
they ignored time and discarded any notion of change, because the deep
structures they discovered were understood to be static and atemporal,
they could not really account for how structures generated surface
meanings, that is, how one structure could change into a different
structure.



This critique is found in the essays collected in *The Conflict of
Interpretations* (1969) and in Ricoeur's detailed
philosophical reading of Freud, *Freud and Philosophy* (1970).
Freud's own philosophy, according to Ricoeur, turns out to be an
archaeology of the subject meant to provide at a theory of culture
(civilization and its discontents), but it lacks the required
corresponding teleology of the subject that would allow for human
creativity and a capable human being. These investigations reinforced
Ricoeur's view that there is no unmediated self-understanding,
leading to a turn to a more dialectical method in his work. This is an
approach through which he seeks to find the middle term that can
mediate between two polar terms and allow us to move back and forth
between them. Locating such a mediating term leads to enhanced
understanding. This understanding always comes about through
interpretation but is also itself open to critique. In other words,
for Ricoeur hermeneutics works with a method that mediates and
negotiates rather than removes the conflict of interpretations.



Besides recognizing the fruitfulness of structural analyses of
particular well-defined fields of experience, Ricoeur resisted those
structuralists and post-structuralists who sought to reduce language
itself to a closed system of signs having no reference to anything
outside itself. Following clues found in the works of Emile Benveniste
and Roman Jakobson, he defined discourse as the use of such sign
systems by someone to say something about something to someone, using
existing but malleable phonetic, lexical, syntactic, and stylistic
rules. That is, discourse always involves a speaker or writer and a
hearer or reader as well as something said in some situation about
some reality, ultimately a world that we might inhabit. It follows
that any interpretation of a form of discourse requires both the
objective sort of analysis for which structuralism provides a tool and
an acknowledgment that there is always a surplus of meaning that goes
beyond what such objective techniques seek to explain. There is a
surplus of meaning because we apply objective techniques to things we
already understand as having a possible meaning without fully
exhausting that meaning. The meaning of acts of discourse is moreover
always open to new interpretations, particularly as time passes and
the very context in which interpretation occurs itself changes.


## 3. Interpretation and the Fullness of Language



On this basis Ricoeur's work after *The Conflict of
Interpretations* addressed a number of related topics. On one
level, he explored the practice of methods of interpretation as an arc
leading from an initial situation and understanding to broadened
understanding, both of the interpreter and the world as a world we can
imagine ourselves as inhabiting. On a second level, he explored the
broader notion of the fullness of language through investigation of
different forms of extended discourse. These are uses of language that
are longer than a single sentence and whose truth and meaning is not
simply reducible to the sum of the truth values of the individual
sentences which make up such extended discourse. On the basis of these
two interwoven levels, he could also take up the questions of selfhood
and responsible human action, allowing him to spell out in greater
detail the ethical theory that had always been implicit in his
philosophy. His discussion of ethics starts from a focus on person to
person relations, the self and just one or only a few nearby others,
characterized in the best case by solicitude for the other person and
the possibility of friendship, then subsequently moved on to the
question of justice and living with others beyond those we may meet
every day or face to face. Here the question of rights and respect for
the faceless other arises. The specific question what is a just
relation in such situations (*The Just*, 2000; *Reflections
on the Just*, 2007), developed out of Ricoeur's
participation in a seminar for judges, and led to his reflections in
the last work published during his lifetime on the idea of mutual
recognition (*The Course of Recognition*, 2005). In those final
years, he also continued to explore other dimensions of the fullness
of language, for example, through some significant essays on the
notion of translation as occurring not just between languages but also
within them (*On Translation*, 2006).



Ricoeur's investigation of practices of interpretation did not
propose a single general theory applicable in each and every case. His
approach was rather to formulate his theory of discourse as a use of
language meant to say something to someone about something using
examples of such discourse and their interpretation. But language as
spoken is ephemeral, it disappears. Ricoeur's genial insight was
to turn to examples that fixed such discourse by inscribing it in
texts or what might be treated as analogous to a text. The event of
speaking might disappear but the text remains for anyone who knows how
to read. Hence it is the meaning of the text rather than the original
author's intention or the originating situation that becomes the
object of interpretation. Structuralism was correct that texts have a
structure. But this structure varies depending on the kind of
discourse inscribed in the text, so discerning that structure and how
it contributes to shaping that discourse helps one identify the
discourse as being of a certain type or genre. Initially recognizing
this genre is something like a guess that has to be confirmed through
interpreting the text, but a good reading also opens interpreters to
being questioned about their initial assumptions by the text in
question. What one discovers through such investigations, Ricoeur
believed, is that there is something like a world of the text that
lies not behind the text but metaphorically in front of it as
something to be explored by the interpreter's imagination. This
is a world that we can think of ourselves as inhabiting.
Interpretations, of course, need to be checked against and challenged
by other interpretations and they will sooner or later need to be
redone as situations change over time. So there is a possibility of
both internal and external critique: is a text coherent in terms of
its generic form, can it be confirmed or falsified by other similar
documents or subsequent data? Explanatory techniques also play a role,
particularly when understanding breaks down. In a nice turn of phrase,
Ricoeur liked to say one then seeks to explain more in order to
understand better. He also agreed with Hans-Georg Gadamer's
theory of hermeneutics that what is finally at stake in interpretation
is a kind of appropriation, although Ricoeur saw this as more oriented
to action in the present than to what Gadamer called the appropriation
of tradition, although tradition always did have a role to play, even
when criticized or rejected. He agreed with Gadamer, moreover, that
the goal of interpretation was to enable us to make sense of our
embodied existence with others including our predecessors and
successors in the world.



Ricoeur did not produce a general theory of interpretation. His
reflections on hermeneutics were themselves an instance of the
philosophical practice of interpretation leading to insight into what
ultimately underlies and enables such activity: the need to interpret
in order to make sense of human life; the move from an initial
understanding to greater understanding on the basis of critical
reflection and an appeal to the imagination; interpolating explanatory
techniques and procedures where understanding breaks down;
appropriation of the meaning of discourse in terms of the world it
projects, as a world one might inhabit. And finally: increased
self-understanding.


## 4. Forms of Extended Discourse



Ricoeur examined a number of different forms of extended discourse,
beginning with metaphorical discourse. Like the talk about symbols he
had explored earlier a live metaphor is a kind of discourse that says
more than one thing at the same time. Live metaphors are the product
of sentences, not the result of substituting one word for another for
decorative or rhetorical effect. They presuppose a kind of odd
predication, a "metaphorical twist". Unlike propositions
which say something is or is not the case, a live metaphor says
"is" and "is not" at the same time, leading
possibly to a redescription of reality. As creative instances of the
use of language, live metaphors can die and be absorbed into the
dictionary (a watch runs). Live metaphors can also extend beyond a
single sentence as in the case of poetic discourse. Poetic discourse
is thus a use of language that redescribes reality. Its truth is more
a matter of manifestation than of coherence or correspondence with
what is assumed to be external reality. In an important sense, this
experienced truth is the basis for talk about coherence and
correspondence, yet paradoxically metaphorical discourse always
presupposes an already existing language that it can make use of. In
this sense, we are never at the origin of language. We can question
back toward this origin but never reach it, since we always must begin
by making use of existing language to question language. Philosophers
of the fullness of language therefore always begin as having already
begun.



Narrative discourse is another form of extended discourse investigated
by Ricoeur. It is a use language that allows us to make practical
sense of human action and time. Ordinary language already contains
concepts that apply to action--those of intentions, motives,
causes, reasons, acts, consequences, agents and patients, for
example--just as it contains concepts applicable to time: past,
present, future, now, then, when. Narrative discourse configures such
heterogeneous concepts into a discourse that locates actions in a time
where one thing happens not just after something else but because of
something else in a followable story or history. It refigures physical
events as narrative events, events which make sense because they tell
what happens in a story or history. But because narratives have
endings or must end, they never fully exhaust time or the possible
long-term meaning of action. Through their plots they are always a
synthesis of heterogeneous concepts into a kind of discordant
concordance which configures the episodes of the story into a told
story. In so doing they resolve practically if not theoretically the
conflict between time understood as a lived now--this present
which has a past and a future--and cosmic time conceived of as a
sequence of points, where any point can be a now point defined not in
terms of its past and future but merely in terms of points that come
before and after it. Narrative interweaves these two perspectives on
time into human time without ever fully resolving the aporias raised
by thinking about time in time.



Religious discourse, at least as found in the Hebrew and Christian
biblical tradition takes many forms: hymns, laws, narratives,
parables, prophecy, wisdom sayings. What they have in common that
specifies them as religious discourse is that they are all forms of
poetic discourse and they all in their own way "name" God.
Within their setting within the biblical canon they do so through
their constituting a polyphony that enables the religious traditions
that use these texts both to identify and to legitimate themselves
through a kind of hermeneutic circle. That is, such texts are sacred
to traditions which take them as legitimating the tradition founded on
these texts, through their reading and interpreting of such texts.



Political discourse is a particularly fragile form of extended
discourse since the political dimension of human existence is one
realm among others like commerce or the arts and also the one that
contains all the others. It is an especially rhetorical form of
discourse in the sense of being discourse that aims at persuasion.
Persuasion is necessary because there is no final resolution of the
conflicts that can arise over questions about the best form of
government or whether there should be, say, a law, what that law ought
to be, or whether laws are required in this case at all. That politics
also is about power, the power to make decisions and command others
adds to the fragility of such discourse in that politics is always
based on a revocable willingness to live together. This leads to a
dialectic of ideology and utopia in Ricoeur's political
philosophy. Ideologies both claim to legitimate the positions of those
in power or those seeking power and cover the gap between what they
assert and the way things actually are. Utopian thinking, in return,
imagines a world without or beyond ideology. It sometimes enables
people to overthrow particularly ruinous forms of ideology, only to
fall back into a dependence on ideology since utopia exists
"nowhere". Yet politics is necessary because it makes
possible life together. That it always takes place between these two
poles of ideology and utopia is another example of a mediating term
between opposed poles in Ricoeur's hermeneutics.


## 5. Narrative Identity and the Turn to Selfhood



At the end of his three volume study of narrative (*Time and
Narrative*, 1984-88) Ricoeur realized that what was said
there pointed to the importance of the idea of a narrative identity.
This has to do not just with the identity of the characters in a story
or history, but with the larger claim that personal identity in every
case can be considered in terms of a narrative identity: what story
does a person tell about his or her life, or what story do others tell
about it? In effect, narrative identity is one of the ways in which we
answer the question "who?" Who is this? Who said that? Did
that? Who is that? Who are we? In his 1986 Gifford Lectures (published
as *Oneself as Another*, 1992) Ricoeur expanded this
investigation to the broader question of what it is to be a self. This
discussion was meant to reply to interpretations of the Cartesian
*cogito* which either made it too strong (one can immediately
be in touch with the self as certain of itself) or too weak (a merely
abstract truth) or even said the self does not exist. Against this
latter idea of a "shattered cogito" Ricoeur proposed a
hermeneutics of selfhood and a "wounded cogito". This was
the idea and reality of a person capable of attesting to his or her
own existence and acting in the world, a self that both acted and was
acted upon who could recount and take responsibility for its actions.
Insofar as we can speak metaphysically of such a self it has to be in
terms of act and potentiality rather than substance.



Ricoeur's argument regarding selfhood proceeds through a
sequence of stages. He begins from the philosophy of language and the
question of an identifying reference to persons as selves, not simply
things. This leads to consideration of the speaking subject as an
agent, passing through the semantics of action Ricoeur had learned
from analytic philosophy during his time in North America. Next comes
the idea of the self as having a narrative identity which is then is
followed by the question of the ethical aim of being such a self. This
hermeneutics of selfhood culminates in the conclusion that one is a
self as one self among other selves, something that can only be
attested to through personal testimony or the testimony of others.
Selfhood is thus closely tied to a kind of discourse that says
"I believe-in". Its certainty is a lived conviction rather
than a logical or scientific certainty.



Along the way Ricoeur to this conclusion introduces a key distinction
between two kinds of identity in relation to selfhood. *Idem*
identity is the identity of something that is always the same which
never changes, *ipse* identity is sameness across and through
change. Self-identity involves both dimensions: I am and am not the
person I was ten years ago. It is the existence of *ipse*
identity that indicates that a self is better thought of in terms of
the question "who?" than in terms of the question
"what" is a self.



Since the self is an agent the question of its ethical aim arises,
allowing Ricoeur to introduce what he calls his "little
ethics". This introduces new predicates for the self and another
path toward the self, one that shifts the argument from description
toward prescription. Ricoeur presents this little ethics through what
he calls its ethical intention: "aiming at a good life lived
with and for others in just institutions" (*Oneself as
Another*, 1992: 172). This formula indicates that there is a
priority of ethics (understood as teleological) over morality
(understood as normative practice). In fact, the structure is
threefold: the ethical aim has to pass through the sieve of the norm,
which is meant to realize the ethical intention, to be applied in
specific situations on the basis of *phronesis* or practical
wisdom that will apply the norm appropriately. It is also possible to
read the sequence backwards: for example, when a disaster, say a new
disease, leads to new normative practices growing out of the response
to it, thereby throwing new light in turn on the ethical intention. At
the level of relations between a self and nearby or intimate others,
the ideal of reciprocity entailed here is best expressed as solicitude
that enables both self-esteem and self-respect on the parts of those
involved. At the level of the distant other or others, the question of
justice arises and with it new notions of respect and of institutions
such as the rule of law that establish and help maintain or restore a
just distance between those involved in them. Underlying both levels
is the idea expressed by the golden rule that one ought not do to
others what one does not want done to him- or herself. And beyond
every institutionalized system of rules lies the transformative
possibility of love which transcends the fragile and provisory
practical meditations established by every ethical system through
applying and, if necessary, reinterpreting the golden rule. Love is a
way of responding not just to the limits of any such system but to the
tragic dimension Ricoeur sees as inherent in all human action, which
never fully achieves what it intends, another reminder that human
freedom is always a finite freedom.


## 6. Memory, History, Forgetting



All these threads in Ricoeur's philosophy come together in
Ricoeur's last big book (*Memory, History, Forgetting*,
2004) pointing to the final revised lectures on recognition. This
three part work first takes up the question of memory and recollection
in response to questions about uses and abuses of memory in
contemporary society. Ricoeur lists these as occurring on a
pathological-therapeutic level as the problem of blocked memory; on a
practical level as manipulated memory, and on an ethical-political
level as obligated memory. He then asks whether history is a remedy
for or a hindrance to these problems. This leads him back to the
question of the epistemology of historical research and writing, a
topic he already had addressed in *History and Truth* (1965)
and *Time and Narrative*. Now the question is to what extent
history depends on memory. Historians know more about the past than
individuals remember, but can history completely break with an appeal
to memory as a kind of testimony? I was there, believe me. The problem
here is suspicion not simply falsification. What is new to
Ricoeur's account is that he sees at work a closer tie between
explanation and understanding than he had considered in his earlier
work where explanation aids understanding. He now speaks of what he
calls explanatory understanding. It runs through what, following the
French historian Michel de Certeau, he now calls the historiographical
operation that characterizes the whole process of historical
documentation, research, and writing. This shift in Ricoeur's
thinking leads him to consider the question of historical
representation as an image based on both narration and rhetoric.
History as written, he suggests, "stands for" the past as
"having been".



On this basis, he can again ask about human existence as historical,
as being within time and ultimately uncanny. He seeks particularly to
address the problem of forgetting in relation to the three problems
listed earlier. Traces of the past can be lost, and that past will be
forgotten in the sense of being beyond memory. But what of forgetting
where the traces remain? Here is where the problems of blocked,
manipulated, or commanded memory remain, especially in the latter case
with attempts to order forgetting either through amnesty or
censorship. This problem leads to an epilogue on the possibility of
forgiveness, something Ricoeur admits is left incomplete. Along the
way though, he shows that the idea of guilt, historical guilt
necessarily runs up against the limit of the imprescriptible and that
forgiveness, which is difficult but not impossible, is something like
a gift, one that unbinds the agent from the act. Beyond the
distinction of a happy memory and an unhappy one in other words lies
the possibility of a forgetting held in reserve. To forgive is not to
forget. It is this idea of forgiveness as a gift, but not one
requiring or expecting a gift in return but as something received and
passed on as a second gift that leads the discussion of mutual
recognition and states of peace in Ricoeur's last book, *The
Course of Recognition*.



Ricoeur's argument there starts from the surprising fact that
there has been no recognized theory of recognition similar to what
exists for theories of knowledge. In fact, when he looks in the
dictionary he finds that the word (which in French carries as strong a
sense of gratitude as of what English calls recognition), the word has
numerous lexical senses. Ricoeur therefore proposes to construct a
chain of conceptual meanings that runs from recognition in the active
voice to its use in the passive voice, to being recognized. The demand
for recognition that runs through this sequence can only be answered,
he claims, by mutual recognition, "where this mutual recognition
either remains an unfulfilled dream or requires procedures and
institutions that elevate recognition beyond the friendship of
face-to-face relations to the political plane" (*The Course
of Recognition*, 19). This sequence of concepts of recognition
runs from identifying something to identifying oneself to recognizing
and being recognized by others. In the process the concept moves away
from simply being identified with knowledge. Instead it opens the way
to knowledge as it relates to self-knowledge and genuine community for
which one is and can be grateful in that recognition "lightens
the weight of obligation to give in return and reorients this toward a
generosity equal to the one that led to the first gift [of being
recognized]" (243).