of instruments.7
The second level is that of “institutions”; it concerns the principles presiding over the choice of the preferable (equality, liberty, justice). Once it is established that human creativity is at work even in the domains of technology and economics, the problem of the criteria for action is posed. In the pages that follow, we see the attempts to apply to concrete cases the distinctions Ricoeur has made in the field of action. In particular, the three levels of morality (the ethics of the good life, the deontology of norms, practical wisdom in situation) will help to shed light on the difficulties encountered in medicine (Chapter 11) or in international relations (Chapter 8). Here again, this pluralizing of viewpoints is a valuable contribution of the political educator. Ricoeur marks the limits of the procedural conceptions of the Rule of Law by examining the aporias generated by democracy. The moment of the institutions is fundamental because it organizes the confrontation without ever setting a definite end to it. Ricoeur’s strategy continues to be the “long detour”: the (modern) impossibility of a sharp decision among substantial conceptions of the good tends toward a culture of conflict. Without it, “le compromis” (genuine compromise) is inevitably lost to “la compromission” (compromising one’s values or character) (Chapter 7).
This twofold effort of conceptual clarification (on the level of technologies and on the level of institutions) is already part of the intellectual’s engagement. The intellectual’s vocation is not to express an opinion on “values,” as if his discourse were free of all historical responsibility. The 1965 article stresses this point, borrowing from Max Weber the distinction between the “ethics of responsibility” and “the ethics of conviction.” The intellectual’s engagement is not only a function of his freedom, it also stems from the fact of being always already caught up in a history in which the individual does not control all the parameters. His responsibility consists in exploring the “paradoxes of the political” rather than relying on certainties dictated by conscience.8 Is this to say that political education is limited to an appeal to realism justified by the necessities of power? Not at all. The political educator accomplishes his task only by recalling “the constant pressure that the ethics of conviction exercises on the ethics of responsibility.”9 The name of this pressure is “utopia”: this word is frequently pronounced in the interviews collected in this volume.10
As much as the social and institutional analysis proceeds through a variation of possibilities based on what already exists, to the same extent utopia allows a radically new possibility to appear. Its dimension is an exile outside of established political and economic orders. Ricoeur long advocated in favor of the concrete utopias at work, for example, in certain religious communities. These communities practice forms of association in the world that escape the logic of technological domination.11 Later, he will define utopia as a product of the social imagination that is opposed to ideology: ideology integrates action into a pre-existing social symbolism, while utopia claims a “nowhere,” in contrast with which ideologies appear in their contingency.12 As the collective expression of a constituting imaginary, utopia serves a subversive function. Responding to its call, a consciousness situated in a world of equipment and institutions becomes a consciousness of “nowhere.”
The political educator, in this way, divides this task between exploring a here and designating an elsewhere. To be sure, “we still perceive some islands of rationality, but we no longer have the means to situate them within an archipelago of unique and all-encompassing meanings” (p. 17). Just as there no longer exists a grand narrative to recapitulate the past, in the same way there is no longer any utopia capable of projecting the desired future. According to Ricoeur, what remains is human social creativity, which marks the source common to the institutional frameworks that are already present and the horizons that extend beyond them. The philosopher’s engagement lies in the promise to revive this source at the very moment it appears to dry up under the weight of the constraints of “the real.”
Michaël Foessel
Notes
1 1 See Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, tr. K. Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). “Life: A Story in Search of a Narrator,” in On Psychoanalysis, tr. D. Pellauer (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012).
2 2 See Paul Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, ed. G. Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
3 3 See Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, tr. E. Buchanan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967).
4 4 See Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, tr. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer, 3 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984, 1985, 1988).
5 5 Paul Ricoeur, “Tâches de l’éducateur politique,” in Lectures 1. Autour du politique (Paris: Le Seuil, 1991), pp. 239–55. The importance of this text is signaled by Ricoeur as he returns to it in one of the interviews published here, Chapter 4, pp. 42–3: “The task of a political educator is also to continually channel back into the flow of public discussion all that is abusively monopolized by the specialists.”
6 6 Ricoeur, “Tâches de l’éducateur politique,” p. 248.
7 7 This is the sense of Ricoeur’s foray into the domain of ecology (Chapter 10).
8 8 See Paul Ricoeur, “The Political Paradox,” a crucial text written in the aftermath of the events in Budapest in 1956, in History and Truth, tr. C. A. Kelby (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965).
9 9 Ricoeur, “Tâches de l’éducateur politique,” p. 251.
10 10 “Only utopia can give economic, social, and political action a human aim and, in my opinion, a twofold aim: on the one hand, envisioning humanity as a whole; on the other hand, envisioning the person as a singularity” (“Tâches de l’éducateur politique,” p. 252). Here again, the vocabulary will change (becoming less personalist), but the positive function of utopia in the social imagination will be affirmed throughout the work.
11 11 See Paul Ricoeur, Plaidoyer pour l’utopie ecclésiale (Paris: Labor et Fides, 2016).
12 12 See Paul Ricoeur, “Ideology and Utopia,” in From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II, tr. K. Blamey and J. Thompson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991), pp. 308–24.
1. I’m Waiting for the Renaissance1
JOËL ROMAN AND ÉTIENNE TASSIN: Your first published book, in collaboration with Mikel Dufrenne,2 is a study devoted to Jaspers. How did you become interested in Jaspers?
PAUL RICOEUR: Before the war, Gabriel Marcel had published the first studies in French on Jaspers, in particular a long article on limit-situations, which really struck me because I was then just starting to focus on the problem of culpability. Later, when we were prisoners of war, Mikel Dufrenne and I were fortunate to have access to the entirety of Jasper’s works in publication at that time. Our attachment to Jaspers was tied to our refusal to repeat the mistake of our predecessors, the veterans of the previous war, who had harshly rejected everything that came from Germany. We thought that the true Germans were in books, and this was a way of rejecting the Germans who were guarding us. The true Germany was us and not them. In publishing this book, in a sense we erased the history of our captivity.
After the war, when Jaspers published works such as The Great Philosophers3 or Von der Wahrheit,4 we no longer followed his work. I have to
