"Testimony should be a philosophical problem and not limited to legal or historical contexts where it refers to the account of a witness who reports what he has seen." -- Paul Ricoeur
Paul Ric?ur (27 February 1913 in Valence, Drôme — 20 May 2005 in Chatenay Malabry, France) was a French philosopher best known for combining phenomenological description with hermeneutic interpretation. As such, he is connected to two other major hermeneutic phenomenologists, Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer.
"Although there has always been a hermeneutic problem in Christianity, the hermeneutic question today seems to us a new one.""But myth is something else than an explanation of the world, of history, and of destiny.""First, it is not unimportant that the legislative texts of the Old Testament are placed in the mouth of Moses and within the narrative framework of the sojourn at Sinai.""For my own part, I abandon the ethics of duty to the Hegelian critique with no regrets; it would appear to me, indeed, to have been correctly characterized by Hegel as an abstract thought, as a thought of understanding.""Hope, insofar as it is hope of resurrection, is the living contradiction of what it proceeds from and what is placed under the sign of the Cross and death.""If it is true that there is always more than one way of construing a text, it is not true that all interpretations are equal.""If the Resurrection is resurrection from the dead, all hope and freedom are in spite of death.""It is always possible to argue against an interpretation, to confront interpretations, to arbitrate between them and to seek for an agreement, even if this agreement remains beyond our reach.""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.""Myth expresses in terms of the world - that is, of the other world or the second world - the understanding that man has of himself in relation to the foundation and the limit of his existence.""Narrative identity takes part in the story's movement, in the dialectic between order and disorder.""On a cosmic scale, our life is insignificant, yet this brief period when we appear in the world is the time in which all meaningful questions arise.""Ordinary language carries with it conditions of meaning which it is easy to recognize by classifying the contexts in which the expression is employed in a meaningful manner.""So long as the New Testament served to decipher the Old, it was taken as an absolute norm.""Testimony demands to be interpreted because of the dialectic of meaning and event that traverses it.""Testimony gives something to be interpreted.""The Law is one aspect of a much more concrete and encompassing relation than the relation between commanding and obeying that characterizes the imperative.""The logic of validation allows us to move between the two limits of dogmatism and skepticism.""The moral law commands us to make the highest possible good in a world the final object of all our conduct.""The narrative constructs the identity of the character, what can be called his or her narrative identity, in constructing that of the story told. It is the identity of the story that makes the identity of the character.""The text is a limited field of possible constructions.""There has always been a hermeneutic problem in Christianity because Christianity proceeds from a proclamation.""There is no shorter path for joining a neutral existential anthropology, according to philosophy, with the existential decision before God, according to the Bible.""This is perhaps the most profound meaning of the book of Job, the best example of wisdom.""What must be the nature of the world... if human beings are able to introduce changes into it?""Wisdom finds its literary expression in wisdom literature."
Ric?ur was born in a devout Protestant family, making him a member of a religious minority in Catholic France.
Ric?ur's father died in a 1915 World War I battle when Ric?ur was only two years old. He was raised by his paternal grandparents and an aunt in Rennes, France, with a small stipend afforded to him as a war orphan. Ric?ur, whose penchant for study was fueled by his family's Protestant emphasis on Bible study, was bookish and intellectually precocious. Ric?ur received his bachelor's degree' in 1933 from the University of Rennes and began studying philosophy at the Sorbonne in 1934, where he was influenced by Gabriel Marcel. In 1935, he was awarded the second-highest agrégation mark in the nation for philosophy, presaging a bright future.
World War II interrupted Ric?ur's career, and he was drafted to serve in the French army in 1939. His unit was captured during the German invasion of France in 1940 and he spent the next five years as a prisoner of war. His detention camp was filled with other intellectuals such as Mikel Dufrenne, who organized readings and classes sufficiently rigorous that the camp was accredited as a degree-granting institution by the Vichy government. During this time he read Karl Jaspers, who was to have a great influence on him. He also began a translation of Edmund Husserl's Ideas I.
Ric?ur taught at the University of Strasbourg between 1948 and 1956, the only French university with a Protestant faculty of theology. In 1950, he received his doctorate, submitting (as is customary in France) two theses: a "minor" thesis translating Husserl's Ideas I into French for the first time, with commentary, and a "major" thesis that he would later publish as Le Volontaire et l'Involontaire. Ric?ur soon acquired a reputation as an expert on phenomenology, then the ascendent philosophy in France.
In 1956, Ric?ur took up a position at the Sorbonne as the Chair of General Philosophy. This appointment signaled Ric?ur's emergence as one of France's most prominent philosophers. While at the Sorbonne, he wrote Fallible Man and The Symbolism of Evil published in 1960, and Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation published in 1965. These works cemented his reputation. Jacques Derrida was an assistant to Ric?ur during this time.
From 1965 to 1970, Ric?ur was an administrator at the newly founded University of Nanterre in suburban Paris. Nanterre was intended an experiment in progressive education, and Ric?ur hoped that here he could create a university in accordance with his vision, free of the stifling atmosphere of the tradition-bound Sorbonne and its overcrowded classes. Nevertheless, Nanterre became a hotbed of protest during the student uprisings of May 1968 in France. Ric?ur was derided as an "old clown" and tool of the French government.
Disenchanted with French academic life, Ric?ur taught briefly at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, before taking a position at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1970 to 1985. His study culminated in The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning of Language published in 1975 and the three-volume Time and Narrative published in 1984, 1985, and 1988. Ricoeur gave the Gifford Lectures in 1985/86, published in 1992 as Oneself as Another. This work built on his discussion of narrative identity and his continuing interest in the self.
Time and Narrative secured Ric?ur's return to France in 1985 as an intellectual superstar. His late work was characterised by a continuing cross-cutting of national intellectual traditions; for example, some of his latest writing engaged the thought of the American political philosopher John Rawls.
In 1999 he was awarded the Balzan Prize for Philosophy "For his capacity in bringing together all the most important themes and indications of 20th century philosophy, and re-elaborating them into an original synthesis which turns language - in particular, that which is poetic and metaphoric - into a chosen place revealing a reality that we cannot manipulate, but interpret in diverse ways, and yet all coherent. Through the use of metaphor, language draws upon that truth which makes of us that what we are, deep in the profundity of our own essence".
On 29 November 2004, he was awarded with the second John W. Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Human Sciences (shared with Jaroslav Pelikan).
Paul Ric?ur died on 20 May 2005 in his home, of natural causes. French Prime Minister Jean Pierre Raffarin declared that "the humanist European tradition is in mourning for one of its most talented exponents".
"Paul Ric?ur speaks of the theologian as a hermeneut, whose task is to interpret the multivalent, rich metaphors arising from the symbolic bases of tradition so that the symbols may 'speak' once again to our existential situation."
Gabriel Marcel and Karl Jaspers. Philosophie du mystère et philosophie du paradoxe. Paris: Temps Présent, 1948.
Entretiens sur l'Art et la Psychanalyse (sous la direction de Andre Berge, Anne Clancier, Paul Ricoeur et Lothair Rubinstein (1964), Mouton, Paris, La Haye 1968.
Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary, trans. Erazim Kohak. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966 (1950).
History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbley. Evanston: Northwestern University press. 1965 (1955).
Fallible Man, trans. Charles A. Kelbley, with an introduction by Walter J. Lowe, New York: Fordham University Press, 1986 (1960).
The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan. New York: Harper and Row, 1967 (1960).
Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970 (1965).
The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. Don Ihde, trans. Willis Domingo et al. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974 (1969).
Political and Social Essays, ed. David Stewart and Joseph Bien, trans. Donald Stewart et al. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1974.
The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies in the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello, S. J., London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1978 (1975).
Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth: Texas Christian Press, 1976.
“Patocka, Philosopher and Resister”. Telos 31 (Spring 1977). New York: Telos Press.
The Philosophy of Paul Ric?ur: An Anthology of his Work, ed. Charles E. Reagan and David Stewart. Boston: Beacon Press, 1978.
Essays on Biblical Interpretation (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980)
Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation, ed., trans. John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Time and Narrative (Temps et Récit), 3 vols. trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984, 1985, 1988 (1983, 1984, 1985).
Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, ed., trans. George H. Taylor. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.
From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991 (1986).
À l'école de la philosophie. Paris: J. Vrin, 1986.
Le mal: Un défi à la philosophie et à la théologie. Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1986.
Oneself as Another (Soi-même comme un autre), trans. Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992 (1990).
A Ric?ur Reader: Reflection and Imagination, ed. Mario J. Valdes. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991.
Lectures I: Autour du politique. Paris: Seuil, 1991.
Lectures II: La Contrée des philosophes. Paris: Seuil, 1992.
Lectures III: Aux frontières de la philosophie. Paris: Seuil, 1994.
The Philosophy of Paul Ric?ur, ed. Lewis E. Hahn (The Library of Living Philosophers 22) (Chicago; La Salle: Open Court, 1995)
The Just, trans. David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000 (1995).
Critique and Conviction, trans. Kathleen Blamey. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998 (1995).
Thinking Biblically, (with André LaCocque). University of Chicago Press, 1998.
La mémoire, l'histoire, l'oubli. Paris: Seuil, 2000.
Le Juste II. Paris: Esprit, 2001.
Reflections on the Just, trans. David Pellauer. University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Living Up to Death, trans. David Pellauer. University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Pamela Sue Anderson, 1993. Ric?ur and Kant: philosophy of the will. Atlanta: Scholars Press.
Larisa Cercel (ed.), Übersetzung und Hermeneutik / Traduction et herméneutique (Zeta Series in Translation Studies 1), Bucharest, Zeta Books 2009, ISBN 978-973-1997-06-3 (paperback), 978-973-1997-07-0 (ebook).
Bernard P. Dauenhauer, 1998. Paul Ric?ur: The Promise and Risk of Politics. Boulder: Rowman and Littlefield.
François Dosse, 1997. Paul Ric?ur: Les Sens d'une Vie. Paris: La Découverte.
W. David Hall, 2007. Paul Ricoeur and the Poetic Imperative. Albany: SUNY Press.
Don Idhe, 1971. Hermeneutic Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Paul Ric?ur. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
David M. Kaplan, 2003. Ric?ur's Critical Theory. Albany, SUNY Press.
David M. Kaplan, ed., 2008. Reading Ricoeur. Albany, SUNY Press.
Richard Kearney, 2004. On Paul Ric?ur: The Owl of Minerva. Hants, England: Ashgate.
David E. Klemm, 1983. The Hermeneutical Theory of Paul Ricoeur: A Constructive Analysis. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press.
Gregory J. Laughery, 2002. Living Hermeneutics in Motion: An Analysis and Evaluation of Paul Ricoeur's Contribution to Biblical Hermeneutics. Lanham: University Press of America.
Charles E. Reagan, 1996. Paul Ric?ur: His Life and Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Karl Simms, 2002. Paul Ric?ur, Routledge Critical Thinkers. New York: Routledge.
Dan Stiver, 2001. Theology after Ric?ur, Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press.
Henry Isaac Venema, 2000. Identifying Selfhood: Imagination, Narrative, and Hermeneutics in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur (Mcgill Studies in the History of Religions), SUNY Press.
