Continental · 1913–2005
Paul Ricœur
French philosopher who joined phenomenology, hermeneutics and narrative
Ricœur held that we understand ourselves only indirectly, through symbols, texts and the stories we tell; he balanced a “hermeneutics of suspicion” (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud) with a hermeneutics of trust.
Life and thought
Paul Ricœur (1913–2005) was orphaned young and raised by Protestant grandparents in Rennes. Captured in 1940, he spent the war in German prison camps, where he translated Husserl’s Ideas I. He taught at Strasbourg, the Sorbonne and the new university at Nanterre, where he served as dean during the turmoil after 1968, and for many years at the University of Chicago.
Ricœur held that we never know ourselves directly, as Descartes hoped, but only by a detour through signs, symbols and texts. Freud, Marx and Nietzsche practised a “hermeneutics of suspicion”, unmasking hidden desires, interests and wills; Ricœur took them seriously but argued that interpretation must also listen to what symbols disclose. In Time and Narrative he argued that stories, both history and fiction, give shape to time, so a person’s identity is a narrative identity, the unity of a life told and retold. Oneself as Another tied this self to ethics: aiming at a good life with and for others, in just institutions.