Paul Ricoeur

Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005), one of the most distinguished French philosophers of the 20th century. Paul Ricoeur was born on February 27, 1913, at Valence. He was a student of the Catholic existentialist thinker Gabriel Marcel and taught mainly at the universities of Paris-Nanterre (until 1970) and Chicago (where he was Emeritus Professor of Divinity). Ricoeur's work was widely influential, despite his never having achieved public celebrity status. Indeed, the very range and depth of his interests was such as to prevent the kind of cult following that grew up around other French intellectuals. Instead he worked to reconcile various perspectives—phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, structuralism, narrative theory, and deconstruction—and to offer the kind of mediating vision that is too often set aside in pursuit of some single (necessarily reductive) framework of enquiry.

Ricoeur's first published texts were studies of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, and Marcel. Thereafter—in works such as La Symbolique du Mal (1960; The Symbolism of Evil, 1967)—he developed a hermeneutic theory of depth-interpretation that derived from both scriptural-religious and secular traditions of thought. His main concern was to seek out a method that would balance the claims of latterday enlightened (demythologizing) thought with those of an older, theocentric, or fideist, approach, that is, an approach that identified truth with a wisdom vouchsafed through divine or inward revelation. Only thus could one hope to avoid the excesses of religious dogmatism on the one hand and on the other a narrowly rationalist outlook closed to all sources of imaginative insight. In this way he sought to rethink the “ancient quarrel” (as Plato already described it) between poetry and philosophy, faith and reason, or creative intuition and enlightened self-critical understanding.

Ricoeur's later writings can best be seen as an immensely resourceful attempt to work out the consequences of this “double hermeneutic” in various fields of enquiry. These include psychoanalysis, in De l'Interprétation: Essai sur Freud (1965; Freud and Philosophy: an Essay on Interpretation, 1970), the theory of metaphor, historiography, ethics (notably Soi-Même Comme un Autre (1990; Oneself as Another, 1992)), political theory, and philosophy of mind and knowledge. Perhaps his most impressive achievement was the three-volume study Temps et Récit (published between 1983 and 1985; Time and Narrative, 1984 to 1987). Here Ricoeur offered a synoptic account of the various modalities of time-consciousness—objective and subjective, historical and fictive, chronometric and phenomenological—described or implicit in the work of Western historians, theologians, novelists, artists, and philosophers from Aristotle down. When read alongside Oneself as Another it manifests the kind of wide reflective equilibrium that is rarely found among the competing specialisms of 20th-century philosophical debate. In 2004 he was awarded the John W. Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Human Sciences, sharing the honour with historian Jaroslav Pelikan. Ricoeur died in Paris on May 20, 2005.