Philosophy, Ethics, and Politics. Paul Ricoeur

Preface: Paul Ricoeur, Political Educator

      “You never know what is chance and what is fate.” This admission of ignorance, appearing in the first of the interviews collected here (p. 5), was often repeated by Paul Ricoeur. Whether it was a matter of accounting for the internal coherence of his work, his intellectual commitments, or his political positions, Ricoeur never believed that biographical knowledge could attain the level of science. What might be daunting in the question of the unity of one’s life for the person asking it can be mitigated by the concept of “narrative identity.”¹ A narrative allows the contingency of events and the necessity attaching to the character or the historical conditions of the subject to be organized into a plot. Instead of relying on reason, he turns to imagination to link chance to fate. New narratives about the same series of events are always possible; not all of these, moreover, are recounted in the first person. In this way, the plurality of plots avoids confusing the bygone past with the inevitable.

The concern with avoiding a premature conclusion is found in most of the dialogues to be read in this volume. Of course, these are historically situated: taking place between 1981 and 2003, they correspond to what could be called Ricoeur’s fully mature period, opening with Time and Narrative (volume one appeared in 1983) and concluding with Memory, History, and Forgetting (2000). From a biographical standpoint, this period corresponds with Ricoeur’s return to the French intellectual stage. This is a “return” because in the 1950s and ’60s Ricoeur played an important role in public debate, in particular in the journal Esprit. During this period, he established the rules for what he conceived to be the engagement of the philosopher with the Polis. As we shall see, this deontology of participation in public discourse will waver no more.

      The 1970s, however, represent a step back with respect to the French intellectual stage. Here too, the shares of chance and fate are difficult to measure. Ricoeur abstains from intervening in a field dominated by Marxism and structuralism; he refrains from speaking in response to the incomprehension generated by his institutional role at Nanterre in 1969, but he also takes advantage of the opportunity to teach in the United States and the encounter with new philosophical approaches. Perhaps, in addition, he was attesting to a conviction he never ceased to hold: the opacity of the present for its contemporaries. Physically absent from the debates of the intelligentsia in France, he confronts them at a distance from the noise of the media. From Chicago, he studies Althusser’s interpretation of Marx.²

      The interviews collected in this volume thus belong to a period in which Ricoeur deems it possible to once again let his voice be heard in France. Chance solicitations play an important role, but there is no doubt that the reduction of ideological polarities in the course of the 1980s assisted in this return to favor. What is heard is not “moderation” or “ecumenism” with which the philosopher was so often reproached, but the method to which he submitted each of his interventions. One characteristic of Ricoeur’s thought is, in fact, never separating the study of a problem (the will, interpretation, action, time, etc.) from questions of method. There is no hiatus between what philosophy does and the reflection on what it can do: describing the will is also questioning the limits of phenomenology with respect to the question of evil;³ thinking about time is also delegating to narrative what reason alone cannot comprehend.⁴

What is true about the philosophy is also true about the philosopher who expresses himself publicly without claiming a higher order of knowledge. Ricoeur thematizes this method of intervention as early as 1965 in “Tâches de l’éducateur politique” [“Tasks of the Political Educator”], his most extensive text on the question of engagement.⁵ Despite its Platonic undertones, the expression “political educator” refers to the pedagogical effort Ricoeur appreciated in Pierre Mendès-France and that he found again later in Michel Rocard (see their dialogue, Chapter 6). To the extent he exposes his thought to the risks inherent in social transformation, the philosopher himself is also expected to specify the areas of his intervention. In this text, Ricoeur distinguishes three levels of society: “tools” (modes of production and the global accumulation of technology), “institutions” (whose character is tied to national cultures), and “values” (which claim to be universal). The discourse of the political educator cannot be confined to the abstract level of values if it hopes to avoid the danger of succumbing to “the deadly illusion of a disengaged, disincarnated conception of the intellectual.”⁶

      Instead of legislating, the philosopher has to cross through the universe of tools and the sphere of institutions. The vocabulary will change, but the standards will be just as exacting in the interviews we read. To escape technocracy, the political educator will bring out what, in existing societies, already goes beyond the commensurable. These are the stakes of Ricoeur’s reflection on the heterogeneity of social goods and the differences between “spheres of justice” (Michael Walzer). At the very moment the Soviet bureaucracy is disappearing, Ricoeur warns against the appearance, at the heart of triumphant capitalism, of other forms of administrated powers. The false homogeneity of “tools” can, in fact, give the illusion of a self-regulating society in which choices are made by no one and as a result call for no confrontation. At this level, the intellectual’s responsibility is to reintroduce conflict. This key word in Ricoeur marks the philosopher’s contribution to the critique of technology and economics. Behind the production of machines and the apparently anonymous logic of growth, we find decisions taken in a conflictual context which has been repressed. The primary

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