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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 task of the political educator is to open up a space once more for democratic confrontation, where the will seems to have capitulated to the rationality 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.