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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 recognize that what occurred at that time was a substitution, in part, of Heidegger for Jaspers, which I now tend to question: in many respects, there were ethical and political criteria inherent in Jaspers’ thought – that is, constitutive of it – that made even clearer the ethical elision that increasingly appears to me to characterize Heidegger’s thought. Retrospectively, Jaspers leaves me with regret and unease, for I sometimes have the feeling of abandoning him along the way, not having continued this post-war encounter.

Did you meet him personally?

Yes, on two occasions. Just after the war, in Heidelberg, then in Basel. By then he had broken with Germany: while he had endured Nazi Germany, he had not endured democratic Germany, which at that time had not repented. He had dreamt of a sort of collective conversion, a collective avowal of responsibility. I met him in Switzerland just after publishing our book: I wouldn’t say he didn’t like it, but he found it too systematic, overly marked perhaps by its French and didactic spirit, whereas he saw himself more in the image of a mighty torrent sweeping away its banks, which we had channeled.

Over the same years, you encountered Husserl’s phenomenology?

I had already caught wind of it before the war, and at Gabriel Marcel’s, curiously enough. Then I read the Logical Investigations.⁵ It was one of the faithful attendees of Gabriel Marcel’s “Fridays,” Maxime Chastaing, who directed me to Husserl. Finally, imprisoned in Germany, I had the chance to have a copy of Husserl’s Ideen,⁶ the first volume of which I translated. I still have the copy from those years of captivity, which I managed to bring back with me despite many obstacles. The translation was written in the margins since we had no paper. In translating Husserl, I had to make a number of choices in translating terms, choices I would not make in the same way today. For example, I did not dare to translate Seiende by “étant” (entity) but by “ce qui est” (that which is). Be that as it may, for me this book has remained absolutely fundamental.

In From Text to Action there is an article titled “From Phenomenology to Hermeneutics,” in which I explain that the passage by way of phenomenology is not canceled by a development that more fully takes into account the plurality of interpretations, although in Husserl we find the idea that there are univocal essences about which a coherent discourse can be formulated.

Did you come to hermeneutics later?

I first came to it by way of a problem arising out of my work on the symbolism of evil, which followed a classical phenomenological study on the voluntary and the involuntary. In the latter, I proposed to do for the field of practice what Merleau-Ponty had done for perception. I am returning now, moreover, to the same questions from the angle of the theory of action. In working on the voluntary and the involuntary, I was relying on clearly readable structures: it is possible to express in intelligible terms the nature of a project, a motive, a capacity for action, an emotion, a habit, and so on. These are, in a sense, the chapters of a phenomenological psychology. But there remained an opaque area, that of bad will and evil. It seemed to me then that I had to change methods, that is, to interpret myths, not just biblical myths but also the myths of tragedy, of orphism, of gnosis. By this symbolic detour, I entered into the hermeneutical problem. Certain problems did not have the clarity, the transparency, I thought I discerned in what Merleau-Ponty termed the “membranes” of voluntary acts. Out of this arose two questions: 1. What can we say about the subject who can know himself or herself only by way of myths? What is the opacity of the self to itself that results in having to pass through the interpretation of grand cultural narratives to arrive at self-understanding? 2. Inversely, what is the status of the interpretive operation that serves as the mediation between the self and itself in this reflexive act? Here, I took the route by way of Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer. This hermeneutical trajectory seemed to me to repeat the neo-Kantian trajectory of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. I also crossed paths with Nietzsche, who interested me for his critique of transparency and of the self-mastery of rationality. All of these investigations were guided by the question: what can we say about the subject through these various revolutions? How can we move from a position that remains relatively Cartesian in Husserl, in the name of a sort of immediacy to oneself, to the recognition of a growing opacity witnessed in the detour by way of myths?

The second shock, alongside that of the hermeneutical tradition, was the shock of psychoanalysis, and for similar reasons. Having worked on culpability through the lens of the great myths, I wondered if there was not another, very different, reading, leading back to the side of the unconscious and not to the side of the great textual tradition. This was the occasion for my work on Freud,⁷ strongly motivated by the failure of a philosophy of the cogito. A twofold failure, on the battlefront of the reading of myths and on the battlefront of the deciphering of the unconscious. In this way, I was led back to my earlier problem, the plurality of hermeneutics and their conflicts.

What has become of this conflict of interpretations? I was entering into a dialectical game, either giving credit to a text, or instead mistrusting it. This dialectic of suspicion/trust played a very important role for me. Systematic mistrust had its Nietzschean and Freudian roots – Marxist too, but, curiously, I was never deeply disturbed by Marx. I did not see in him the power of disruption I found in Nietzsche or Freud. I was interested in Marx for other reasons: for the problem of ideology as a deceptive form of knowledge. My most recent book dealing with the relations between “ideology and utopia,”⁸ expresses quite well the crux of my relation to Marx, which is a rather tranquil relation, whereas I have always found Nietzsche more invigorating.

Finally, there was the “linguistic turn” leading you to take a closer interest in what is commonly termed “Anglo-Saxon philosophy.”

The linguistic turn for me was made inside of hermeneutics, because to reflect on myths is to remain within language. As I was frequently employing the notions of symbol and symbolism in my works on the symbolism of evil and on Freud, I realized that my own use of the word “symbol” lacked a linguistic foundation. I had to go back and start again from Saussure and, especially, from Benveniste: from the latter, I retained the notion of the irreducibility of discourse to the word, and so of the linguistics of the sentence to the linguistics of the sign. Concurrently, I was encountering analytical philosophy in its dual forms: the analysis of ordinary language, and the philosophy of well-constructed languages, logical languages. I always found solid support in the tradition of Austin, Strawson, etc., who started with what people say, with the idea that ordinary language contains an unbelievable wealth of meaning. This connection between phenomenology, linguistics, and analytical philosophy, in its least logicist aspect, gave me the resources of hybridization to which I owe so much. Analytical philosophy continues to fascinate me by its level of argumentation. This is what forces our respect: the choice of arguments, counterexamples, rejoinders. At times the object of analysis is slighter than the instrument of analysis: this is what we in France often perceive, we who have difficulty opening ourselves to this argumentative rigor. The flipside of this attitude is the professionalization of philosophical activity. I myself am somewhat of a victim of this effect: no longer writing for the general public, but writing for the greatest specialist in one’s discipline, the one you have to convince.

How is it that you have split your time between the United States and France? Is it the result of chance, or were there possibilities of work in the United States that attracted you?

You never know what is chance and what is fate. I have often been struck by the fact that the anecdotal becomes the necessary after the fact. When I returned from Germany after my captivity, looking for somewhere to regain my health, I taught for three years in Chambon-sur-Lignon in a small Protestant secondary school in the mountains, where pacifist American Quakers had come to the aid of French teachers and educators who had participated in non-violent resistance in aiding the Jews. The first time I visited the United States it was to a Quaker college. The Quakers were the first American link during the period of reconstruction within the small province of French Protestantism. Then I taught in New York until 1970, when I was appointed as a visiting professor to the Divinity School and the Philosophy Department of the University of Chicago. I have since divided my time, in the proportion of two thirds/one third, between France and the United States. I continue to teach there.

You have had university responsibilities in France. What are your thoughts in comparing the two university systems?

The comparison makes obvious first of all the poverty of the French system: it is just simply cruel. To be sure, in Chicago I taught in a very selective framework, with students in doctoral programs: one could have no more than twenty-five students at once, direct no more than five dissertations, etc. This is just in no way comparable to what I experienced at the Sorbonne, which, moreover, I had already left to go to Nanterre, before taking early retirement.

I had not been happy in that system for pedagogical reasons: it is a system that gives little credit to students, that does not afford them the means to do research. An American student has no more than twenty hours of class, while a French student often has a lot more, up to thirty-five hours in some disciplines. A student’s work consists in taking in the courses and regurgitating them; there is no engagement with the texts, with the library. This question really disturbs me: how is it possible that societies so similar in other ways, advanced industrial societies, can have produced such different systems of education? This is indisputably where the imprint of history is the strongest, to such an extent that our systems are practically incommunicable, even in Europe. Systems of education are the most difficult to reform. It is a paradox that a system of education is supposed to be the most forward looking, since by definition we are dealing with people who will be operational ten or twenty years later. Yet we have a tendency to teach as we were taught; there is something very regressive in the role of a teacher. In systems in which innovation is more highly prized, as in the American system, one is led to reflect more on one’s practice and to be creative, inventive. You can have a short seminar, a seminar where you never speak, a seminar where two or three people speak: anything is permitted, as long as the students show up.

You have been very active in the International Institute of Philosophy, and have served as its president. What role does this kind of institution play?

It is by invitation only: there are nine French philosophers, five English philosophers, nine Americans, etc., one hundred and ten or twenty members in all. Each year, the Institute holds a meeting on a rather technical subject; this year the theme will be: “signifying and understanding.” There is a clear Anglo-American slant, but also a strong Continental counterpart: Gadamer and Habermas for Germany, and, on the French side, Granger, who is rather close to the Anglo-American tradition, but also Aubenque and Levinas. This is a milieu of very high-level discussion, but also a meeting place, more so than the large international symposia. The international congresses of philosophy, held every five years, are open more widely, while the meetings of the Institute are more selective. But the Institute is also the only place where analytical philosophy, which tends to be dominant, at times contemptuous, accepts a reciprocal encounter. Conversely, here “Continental” philosophers have discovered the wide variety of so-called “analytical” philosophy and the possibilities of hybridization with so-called “Continental” philosophy. The marriage between Kantian transcendentalism and Anglo-Saxon pragmatism, which is evidenced for example in Habermas’s work, is in this respect a very important cultural event, one that is not, however, without pitfalls as it tends to construct an American-German bridge above our heads. From this standpoint, I am not convinced that ruminating over the Heideggerian heritage is the best way to maintain contact with the Germanic world in order to keep it from completely tipping over into the American universe. German thought, moreover, suffers from certain defects it shares with French thought: the recourse to history, the endless recapitulation of the tradition (Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel), with which people like Habermas and Luhmann have broken, being less overwhelmed by the historical tradition than we are. I don’t say this negatively, for there is always the risk, on the other side, of a thought lacking memory.

Bloom, it seems, charged Rawls with a lack of education.⁹ French philosophy, however, has difficulty exiting two impasses: rereading the classics, with the intent, to be sure, of understanding them better and better; and, on the other hand, an inability to take on new subjects. The question is endlessly posed whether philosophy is dead, whether philosophy is possible for itself; one cannot endlessly do the philosophy of philosophy, but must move beyond this to think about something, breaking with this aspect of commentary and marginal notation, even in the strong sense that Derrida has given to the word “margin,” but which always amounts to writing in the margin of the greats.

And yet, this was the intention of phenomenology at the outset?

Indeed, it was a matter of placing oneself before specific objects and phenomena in order to ask oneself on a domain-specific basis about ways of positing something, without positivism. The lack of concern for ways of positing things disturbs me in contemporary French philosophy: it leaves the field open for an epistemology that adopts what others have posited. A glaring example of this today is Granger, who declares that philosophy has no object, only sciences have an object.¹⁰ I believe that we have to rediscover an object. For example: what does it mean to be a living being in the world – acting, suffering, speaking? I would defend the idea of a philosophical anthropology, which is often treated with disdain, in particular by those heirs of Heidegger who condemn an anthropological reading of Heidegger. On the contrary, what I find great in Heidegger is his philosophical anthropology.

Is there not, however, a positive aspect in the critique of the non-thematized philosophical anthropologies at work in the human sciences, for example in Lévi-Strauss and Piaget? These are anthropologies of “neuronal man,” postulating a fundamental reductionism.

Yes, but how can one denounce reductionism, unless one can present in opposition to it certain irreducible ways of positing things? However, what I am more critical of is not so much the idea that man is dead, but its counterpart: that man is recent. In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, books III and IV sketch out a philosophical anthropology that aims to show how the ethical and political capacity of human beings is ontologically possible. What sort of being must a human being be to be capable of decision, and so to be a political subject as well? A political philosophy constructed on an anthropological void seems to me doomed to be purely procedural: its sole political theme is then procedural coherence, something with which Rawls, precisely, has been reproached. But Rawls’s argument is also based on what he calls “considered convictions”: these rest, I think, on a certain invariant in ethical formalism. There are common convictions: we have always known that a person is not a thing, and the philosopher’s responsibility is to say what the differential features are that make a person worthy of respect simply by being a person. When you look at current questions in medical ethics, they demonstrate the fruitfulness of Kantian formalism in reflecting on these problems.

I am wary of the Hegelian idea that the moral principle should be replaced by Sittlichkeit under the pretext that the former is empty. And what if the latter is corrupted? Sittlichkeit did not prevent the advent of Nazism: what resisted was the upright Moralität of some people, like Bonhœffer and others, based on a certain idea of human beings. From this point of view as well, I would break with the Heideggerian idea that there is a single metaphysics and that it has ended. I believe, on the contrary, that there have been metaphysics in the plural, and that we have always had to choose our camp. I see nothing outmoded in the philosophy of the past. There have been various positions, open to unexpected Renaissances: who could have thought that Europe in the twelfth century would be Platonic? I am waiting for the Renaissance.

Do you cross paths here with Levinas’s reflection?

I owe much to him, but resist two points: first, the idea that ethics is to be developed without an ontology (a pretext stemming from Heidegger, and perhaps, beyond Heidegger, from Nietzsche). I am indeed not sure that the idea of being has to exhaust itself in a synoptic, virtually totalitarian, representation – in any case, one locked around the Self and requiring that the Other break in to enter. Isn’t there a possible ontology of act and power? Is there no way of reworking a miscarried ontology such as this? The philosophical tradition preserves certain clues, certain promises in this regard, for example in Spinoza’s conatus, or Leibniz’s dynamism, or again in Schelling. Ontology must not be aligned with substance or with essence. Vacant and incomplete ontologies can be appropriated for ethical alternatives and joined to problematics of otherness like that of Levinas.

The second resistance stems from the fact that the primacy of otherness is pushed so far by Levinas that it tends to remove all consistency from the “I.” When Levinas says that responsibility requires absolute passivity from me, that I am the receptor of an act that is not mine, and that this passivity must not turn back into action, with my becoming once again the master, to be sure, he forces us to think by moving the needle to the other side, in opposition to Husserlian egology. But if there were not in subjectivity the capacity to initiate, how could the response come: “Here I am”? How could the other awaken in me the ability to respond, if there were not in subjectivity a sort of latent capacity for acting? And this leads us to the Kantian antinomy: what is a subject capable of acting? These are my points of resistance when I read Levinas. At the same time, they express my debt. I too struggle against the idea that I am the master of sense. I have written about this, speaking of the “wounded cogito.”

In addition, I perceive in many French philosophers the tendency to dismiss the human sciences, which seems dangerous to me; when philosophy exiles itself from established sciences, it can then be in dialogue only with itself. Now, all the great philosophies have been in dialogue with a science: Plato with geometry, Descartes with algebra, Kant with physics, Bergson with evolution. For a philosophical anthropology, its partners are the human sciences. The established sciences are too quickly cast aside with an antipositivist argument, which is turning into a lazy argument. One has to earn the right to respond to arguments one judges to be positivist. If all we have to offer is the self-destruction of philosophy, we leave the field open for positivisms; today we see scientists forced to come up with a provisional philosophy, because philosophers are deserting the philosophical object. This worries me: I see in this retreat at once an arrogance and an excessive modesty. I am shocked by statements like those that open the work of Lacoue-Labarthe for example,¹¹ on the impossibility of continuing philosophy.

The discourse of ethical nakedness in Levinas, on the one hand, and the discourse of the end of philosophy on the other, leave a void in the middle, allowing the sciences to take up the themes abandoned by philosophy.

Indeed, there are objects that are totally forsaken, even by analytical philosophy, outside the domain of epistemology. For example, the object of the historian: what is a past being? This seems to me a philosophical question, since the past is not something observable nor is it a fiction: so, what is its status? What is “having been” for an event of which we continue to speak? What is at stake is the ontological status of the past as such. I attempted to treat problems of this kind in Time and Narrative, and I don’t see why they would have become obsolete through the recent death of a type of discourse. Or then we’ll have to find another line of work. If we moan about the falsification of language, then we have to say what an unfalsified language would be. If we criticize the domination of technology, then what would constitute a restored relation to nature? I find myself opposed both to those who say philosophy is dead and take this as their thematic, and to those who, like Levinas, say that one must develop a philosophy without any thematic. My conviction is that Levinas is saying something else. The type of discourse he makes possible by his refusals is as important as what he attacks. He restores another space in which one can again speak of the “I,” of the self, of identity, in a discourse that can draw support from Anglo-Saxon works devoted to personal identity. Examples: Is identity what is unchanging? Do selfhood (ipséité) and sameness overlap? What does the second person signify if not that it is capable of saying “I” for itself? Here, we are straightaway in a debate with linguistics, with the theory of deictic functions, of self-referential meanings, or further with the intensional/extensional distinction. Linguistic instruments are entirely appropriate for these types of reflections, which otherwise are doomed to remain declarative or proclamative.

In this regard, I do not see how one could develop a political philosophy and reflect on democracy – that is to say, the regime that gives place to conflicts and negotiation, and thus in which there is maximum participation in decision-making – if one cannot say what a deciding being is. This is an anthropological problem: what is a being who makes a decision in a social context, with others than herself? If I say I am hostage to the other, as Levinas thinks, what can I do? What politics can I engage in? Levinas himself is led to value the third party, that is to say, the faceless. I enter into a relation of justice when I have duties and rights with respect to people I will never meet: people who sort my mail and deliver it to me within twenty-four hours… The social bond is composed of all these faceless individuals. What is the status of the faceless? The “each one,” which is distributive, the German je, which is not the on (“one”), as in the expression “to each his due.” It is because of the problem of justice that I became interested in Rawls: how can a relation of justice be established in an unequal distribution? All unequal distributions are not morally equivalent. Now, how can the idea take root that the most unfairly disadvantaged participant in an unequal distribution must be respected, if one does not have a certain conception of persons as irreplaceable? In his opening pages, Rawls affirms that justice is the virtue of institutions. In this way, there is an irreducibility of the phenomenon of institutions: the rules of living together are derivable neither from the self-positing of a subject – and from this standpoint one is right to invoke Levinas – nor from the injunction in the second person. I should like to connect the reciprocity in the distribution of tasks and roles to the notion of “each one”: the institution distributes roles and, in this way, engenders the “each one.” But the operator of distribution is other than these roles. We rediscover Levinas’s third party and even the Old Testament: the widow and the orphan Levinas speaks of. I do not necessarily know the widow and the orphan, they are social situations. In tribal societies, the widow was someone whose husband left no brother to marry her, and so someone who could not be taken back into the system of kinship. This is the very model of the third party, the faceless par excellence. It is to them that we have a duty of justice. Insofar as tribal rules function, there is no need to raise the problem of justice. Things have not fundamentally changed. Today as well, there are those who are left out of the distribution. What should astonish us, however, is that we believe that they have a right. What is the basis of this right, if not the fact, not always perceptible, that these are persons? For this, we need concepts of capacity, of disposition, which, once again, are concepts belonging to an anthropology, putting into play ontological resources such as dynamis, energeia.

When you say there is something here to be thought, is this also a matter of public intervention? Should the philosopher intervene in the public debate?

Yes, although the appropriate place is not always the political scene in the narrow sense, but instead in places like associations, for it is a matter of reconstructing a civil society that does not coincide with the political society. With respect to the fourth world, local action is most effective. To recall Edgar Morin’s analyses, we are confronting a social object that is much more complex than all the models we could apply to it in order to change it: we must describe the complex object, but intervene where we are. Global strategies have too wide a mesh; we need more narrowly targeted strategies, based on neighborhood relations, etc. There are resources of generosity still slumbering that have to be awakened by playing on passions that are good passions.