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ARNAUD SPIRE: You have expressed on many occasions your reservations regarding attempts to explain a philosophical work by the life of its author. Do you think that a body of work like yours speaks for itself?

PAUL RICOEUR: That is a reader’s point of view, which does not entirely correspond with my own. I am aware instead of the fragmentary character of my philosophical work. Each of my books gravitates around a well-determined question. A chronological approach can be justified to the extent that each work develops out of questions unresolved in the preceding one. Here is an example. The Symbolism of Evil, the second part of volume two of my Philosophy of the Will,² comes out of an unresolved question in the first volume that concerned the voluntary and the involuntary, where I speak of a sort of “innocent will,” that is to say, a will for which the question of good and evil does not arise. The history of humanity, of peoples, however, is profoundly marked by evil in the form of violence, lies, and oppression. The fact that this appears nowhere in a philosophy of the “voluntary” in opposition to the “involuntary” appeared untenable to me. So, I then approached the theme by way of the myths that recount how evil came into the world – in particular, by way of those myths at the origin of Western culture. Interpretations of these symbols and grand narratives already existed. In this way, I was confronted by readings of the origin of evil opposed to my own, by those I called the “philosophers of suspicion.” I considered the interpretations of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche to be reductive, in the sense that, by reduction, they take us “back behind.” I mean reduction to the economic and social foundation in Marx, reduction to instincts in Freud, and reduction to the will to life and to the depths of desire in Nietzsche. All these reductions conflicted with the amplifying interpretations opening toward a sort of sacred horizon.

In short, according to you, whether in Marx, Freud, or Nietzsche, evil is conceived in a reductive manner, since in each case evil is reduced to a single cause. On the other hand, you have developed a conception of evil that is plural and multiform.

The notion of the conflict of interpretations concerns both sides of the opposition. It is not a matter of replacing a conception of evil that is too material or too instinctual with a conception that is more spiritual. The conflict of interpretations gives both sides their due. It is, moreover, a general feature of my work that I always place myself at a crossroad of conflict. I try to move beyond what can be paralyzing in a position that oscillates between two poles, and it is in this sense that each of my books generally takes up what was left unresolved in the preceding one. This forms a chain that is half-chronological, half-dialectical. I never seek a middle or intermediary path. I simply place emphasis on the creativity that language carries. In this, I participated in the “linguistic turn” common to all schools of philosophy in the 1960s and 1970s. At the same time, I transposed the conflict of interpretations into a new framework of reflection, which allowed me to see both sides of the question – the regressive side, which indeed seems to me to be the ground of the human imagination, as well as the prospective side. The human imagination includes both the side one could term nostalgic, and the side one could call prophetic.

That is when I began to deal with the problem of metaphor, which is, to begin with, the problem of replacing an ordinary word with a word that produces an image. Formulated in this way, the topic appears to be limited to the functioning of poetic language. But it seemed to me that metaphor was the focal point of creativity in language. Through this work, I tried to show that language is not simply an instrument employed to satisfy the basic needs of ordinary conversation, nor is it reducible to scientific language, but is amazingly revelatory of the hidden face of things and of aspects buried deep within our experience. Poetic language thus breaks with ordinary language, and even with scientific language. It is not a descriptive language that tells us about reality, rather poetic language reveals aspects of the habitable world that are concealed, as it were, by everydayness or by the manipulability of things.

Do you mean that it is an instrument that goes beyond its instrumentality?

Oh yes! In this regard, I am opposed to another type of reduction, with which I reproach the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger: to have narrowed scientific language to its technological applications, as if technology had swallowed up science! The totally disinterested character of science must be affirmed, in contrast to the instrumental character of technology. And this does not prevent scientific language from “saying” the world under two conditions: the first is conformity with respect to what is observed, the second is conformity with respect to logical coherence. These two rules, observation and coherence, are violated by poetic language, thereby exploding language. In short, I tried to tie the revelatory character of poetic language to its subversive aspect. Scientific language has its logical discipline, and even its ethical discipline. Its demand for rigor grounds the standards proper to it. Poetry is language in festive mode; it expresses aspects of the world and of my participation in the world that I would never have perceived without the profusion and the somewhat delirious character of poetic language. This question was at the core of my book The Rule of Metaphor [La Métaphore vive].³ The adjective “living [vif]” is truly important, inasmuch as our everyday language is a huge cemetery of dead metaphors. In this way, the “leg” of a chair or the “saddle” of a mountain pass are no longer metaphors perceived to break with ordinary language, but have been integrated into it. The poet, I would say, is the guardian of metaphors inconvertible into ordinary language.

Time and Narrative is the work that is twin to The Rule of Metaphor. In it, you widen the scope of the creativity of language to the narrative and to its plot, and no longer confine it to metaphor alone. By extending your area of investigation to all texts that are susceptible to multiple interpretations, haven’t you broached the idea that all things human go beyond their simple material existence?

The plurality of meanings is characteristic of basically all language that is not strictly descriptive or logical. In Time and Narrative – second to be born, but conceived at the same time – I considered another side of the creativity of human language: no longer the lyrical side, but the narrative side. My idea was that the construction of plots in the narrative domain displayed the same creative capacity as the invention of metaphors in the lyrical domain. There is thus a parallel between the creative power of metaphor and that of the plot in the narrative domain. This, of course, took me much further than I had foreseen, because the narrative does not simply concern the epic, tragedy, or the novel but also the field of history. I tried to defend the idea that the art of recounting covers a range of narratives extending from fairytales to grand historical narration. Having arrived at this point, my work took off in a new direction. I tried to group together all these approaches and asked myself, in a recapitulative mode in Oneself as Another, what had become of the subject in all this. I attempted to link together the speaking subject, the acting subject, the narrating subject, the moral subject, and the political subject. Who speaks? Who acts? Who recounts? Who is responsible? Who is the political subject? In this way, I came to the idea that the only one who can pose the question “who?” in all other domains is the one who can be a citizen-subject.

I continue to think that your thought eludes any chronological exposition. From History and Truth, first appearing in 1955, to Oneself as Another, published in 1990, Olivier Mongin, the most recent of your biographers, asserts that for you, meaning “sacrificed on the altar of history … has again become a wager.”⁴ You have added the work of mourning with respect to the history of the subject to the work of mourning with respect to meaning. Have you not always, and at first just in anticipation, questioned whether one can, at the same time, understand past history and make current history without giving in to the systematizing spirit of philosophies of history?

There is certainly a first level, the level of the history one suffers and of the history one makes. By this juxtaposition I mean to say that I have never abandoned Marx’s formula that man makes history under conditions he has not made. This aspect of the participation in history, at once active and passive, is constitutive of the human being as historical. An historical being is one who, at one and the same time, suffers and makes history. This being thereby creates its identity in this twofold relation. The history of historians lies on another level. What degree of truth can it claim? This history can itself be viewed on several levels. To begin with, there is a basic documentary stage, then a level of national, economic, and political history, as well as the history of “mentalities.” The third level, that of “grand narratives,” raises the question of whether one can consider the entire history of humanity to be meaningful. I dealt with this conception in a chapter of Time and Narrative, Volume 3, to which I gave the title “Should We Renounce Hegel?” It is true that we live in a period today that is profoundly marked by the suspension of a global view. This is especially true since the end of the Cold War and the end of the great bipolar political framework that still had the appearance of rationality. I recall, in this regard, a remark by one of my historian friends, saying goodbye to his research center on the history of the present: “If the nineteenth century recognized the category of ‘the ruse of reason,’ in the twentieth century we have instead been introduced to the category of ‘the surprise of history.’” I also think that we are much more aware of indeterminacy, which has perhaps always existed, but was relatively well masked by the grand visions, the grand syntheses of history. 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. This justifies, I think, taking a position that emphasizes morality and the will. In the absence of a meaning that is given and all-encompassing, it is necessary to project a meaning that we derive from our moral ground: justice, equality, the struggle against oppression. We live in a period when, for lack of a given historical sense, it is by means of a self-imposed moral sense that we can take over from the great philosophies of history. This is the responsibility of the philosopher. It is no longer the province of a teleology (a vision of the world organized in view of an end), but of a deontology (a set of ethical rules following from the positing of a subject).

In this passage from one problematic to the other, what is the place of the “work of mourning”?

In History and Truth, after the events in Budapest in 1956, I added a text titled “The Political Paradox.”⁵ It is not by chance that in a book called History and Truth a third term appears – precisely the political – understood as the site of a major conflict between the meaning which is given by the form of the legal State and the violence that remains in every State as such. This is where the deep-seated irrationality of all power resides. In my work, the notion of the paradox of the political takes the place of the meaning of history, which was believed to contain a supra-moral injunction. It is on this basis that, for Hegel, we carry out the mourning, in the sense of the “work of mourning.” It is not a matter of lamentation, but of moving toward the future. In performing this work of mourning, we show we are capable of surviving the objects lost.

Can Oneself as Another be considered a sort of completion? Hadn’t your intention been to extend the reach of Husserl’s phenomenology (a philosophical discourse organized around phenomena) into French philosophy in the form of a philosophy of action? May I indicate the new philosophical dimension that results from this, narrowing it to the generalized effort to replace the formidable pair “question-response,” with a new pair “call-response”?

The organizing principle of Oneself as Another is the idea of the acting and suffering human being, or as I sometimes say, the capable human being. This is a being capable of speaking, capable of acting, capable of promising, one whose actions can be coordinated with values one has given to oneself (values potentially ascribable to oneself and to an other than the self). To my mind, this notion of the capable human being has become absolutely central, because it allows me to link together, on the one hand, what could be called an anthropology – a kind of general description of what it is to be a human being – and, on the other hand, a morality, inasmuch as a human being is essentially worthy of respect to the extent that I discern in that being the capacity to be himself or herself. From this standpoint, I adopt as the first maxim of my action: any other life, by reason of its capacities, is just as important as mine. In addition, what characterizes humanity in human beings, what makes them worthy of respect, is not situated on the plane of morality alone, but on the plane of the political as well, making the Polis the place where human capacities are realized. In this regard, I would say that there are vast numbers of men and women who, for me, are faceless, but with respect to whom I have rights and duties. This is the level of the institution, notably of power and of the political. The idea that there are two others – the other who is close, the other of encounters and dialogues, and a distant other, who exists as a relation in and through an institution – this idea should have a place in contemporary philosophy. The other, too quickly and too facilely, becomes “you” (“toi”), whereas in reality relations of friendship and love stand out against a backdrop of otherness that extends to the frontiers of humanity. There is, in this regard, a beautiful passage in Perpetual Peace by the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, where he asserts that this peace implies a “universal hospitality.”

I would like to interrupt your reflection here with a question that to me seems not unrelated to current events. Even though certain teleological interpretations of Karl Marx – in the mode of “communism is the society of bright tomorrows” – have given birth to monstrosities from the standpoint of human emancipation, do you think there could still be a future for a deontology in which Marx would be seen as a thinker of the possible?

With other thinkers, I share the view that it is as if Marx’s work were covered over by Marxism, in particular by the German Marxism of the Second International. In truth, what failed historically was the legacy of that Marxism. From this sprang the invention of the most stupid conceptions, such as the opposition between “proletarian science” and “bourgeois science,” “proletarian art” and “bourgeois art.” And probably also the idea that politics, morality, and religion are “superstructures.” Now, basically everything is both infrastructure and superstructure, depending on the standpoint of the analysis. Our problem is to determine to what extent Marx is left unscathed by all this. The end of ideological Marxism – that is to say, of Marxism used as a justification for political power – frees Marx for readings in which we can read him in exactly the same way as the economists he criticized. With Marx, in fact, we have three questions on our hands!

Starting off, does anything remain of his economics in an age in which production is no longer the extension of human physical effort – as were the energies exerted in the nineteenth century – but instead, with cybernetics, an extension of the brain, of logic? Does Marx belong to an outmoded technological era, or does his work contain a way of conceptualizing “living labor” that continues to be effective? I believe that this must be approached in a free and open manner, now that power is no longer at stake here. We can reread his work freely and tranquilly, in the same way we would do for Spinoza or Kant.

Next, in addition to determining up to what point Marx is untouched by the deviations that claimed to follow from his thought, we must also determine to what extent he did justice to the specificity of the political realm. I had doubts about this after the events in central Europe. Is there not in Marx the prejudice (in the strong sense of the term) that there is no history proper to the political and that the latter is nothing but an effect of the history of economics? I believe that important segments of the history of Europe have not been sufficiently considered. I have in mind the history of free cities – Italian, Flemish, Hanseatic – and not simply those of English parliamentary democracy. There is perhaps a properly political history of liberty which overlaps and intersects with the history of the relations between labor and capital. And, based on this, there may be an evil specific to politics that is not necessarily the expression of the economic evil of exploitation, an evil that would stem from the very exercise of power. A certain silence of Marx on this aspect has created a breach in which openly Machiavellian uses of power have been swallowed up.

Finally, on the symbolic level of signs, language, and norms – a level that is foundational in its own way – do we not encounter the limit of an explanation referring back to Marx? For example, if mechanization did not develop in Antiquity, it was not only because there were slaves, but also because in that period work was not valued as the expression and the means of human education and development. Is it not only once labor has become fundamental to the education of the human species that its emancipation will be called for? This question concerns the place of technologies in relation not only to the political realm but to the symbolic realm as well. This is the domain that was the most deeply concealed by Marxism after Marx. I condemn this period for its occultation of the profound resources of Marx’s work, the essential content of which was hidden behind a very ideological vision serving to justify a power which itself was in no way grounded in the great texts of Marx.

In Oneself as Another you reserve the term “ethics” for the “aim of an accomplished life” and the term “morality” for “the articulation of this aim in norms characterized at once by the claim to universality and by an effect of constraint.”⁶ You write: “‘From you,’ says the other, ‘I expect that you will keep your word’; to you, I reply: ‘You can count on me.’”⁷ In this way, do you think you have succeeded in articulating the contradiction between the claim to universality of human rights and duties on the one hand, and the singularity of each individual on the other?

Today we have models of universalities that have nothing to do with that proposed by Hegel, or any other philosophy of history. We have the model of the American philosopher, John Rawls, with his theory of justice. Or that of the German philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, with his ethics of communication and argumentation. What is universal is the capacity for argumentation, independent of the content of the arguments. Today the problem is no longer linking the universal to the singular but rather the abstract universal to the historical. This debate finds one of its expressions in the rebirth of nationalism. On the one hand, nationalism seduces by the concrete richness of its content, its mores, its practices, its shared convictions, and ultimately by its purely ethnic identity. On the other hand, a purely abstract conception of universality leaves us unsatisfied. One of our great contemporary problems lies in connecting this abstract universal with the history of communities. On one side, we find the tradition of the social contract, which is an abstract reality, and on the other, the tradition of shared communities, which are concrete realities.

There are parts of the world where this dilemma has not yet reached maturity or where it is not even perceived at all. Whether this is in Yugoslavia or in other conflicts of the same type, we lack a sense of history in this regard. In our geopolitical era, we are judging within the framework of a political morality born in 1945. At that time, we made a sort of pledge, implicit throughout all of Europe, that we would no longer treat one another as we had previously done in world wars. However, there is a part of Europe where this message was not received, and it continues to behave as we had up to 1945. I am also thinking of Algeria, confronted with two forms of corruption, that of the FIS [Front islamique du salut] and that of the FLN State [Front de libération nationale]. In regressive situations such as these, faced with grave moments of disaster, only a few committed individuals, only a few indomitable consciences, are responsible, in reality, for the future of civilized society. For me, conviction is the response to crisis: my place is assigned, the hierarchy of preferences compels me, the intolerable transforms me from a timid or disinterested spectator into a person of conviction, who discovers in creating and creates in discovering. The lucidity of our gaze does not spare us from engagement in protest or from the will to repair breaches.

Your philosophical thought seems to me to be based more on a reinterpretation of Kantian republicanism than on an act of religious faith. For, if every person is to be considered an end in himself or herself and not a means to an external end, does this not presuppose that in reality it is otherwise? Have you not asked yourself whether what is left unexamined in this Kantian precept is not, deep down, the exploitation of one person by another?

In one of his political writings, Kant speaks of “unsocial sociability.” On the judicial level, the law, and on the political level, the Rule of Law [l’État de droit], serve to make possible the coexistence of beings whose desires and interests are often in conflict. The fact that we aren’t at one another’s throats, that we accept to live together, constitutes a minimum of consensus. Conflict is not, for all that, absent from the scene inasmuch as, individually or collectively, we have competing interests. Contemporary society is increasingly conflictual because it is increasingly complex. Conflict is not a misfortune, but a structural element in a society in which, as the diversity of projects never ceases to grow, a rule of the game that will make coexistence possible is ever more urgent. This future, however, raises in return the entirely new question regarding the people who are excluded from this rule of the game. The result of this exclusion is a form of poverty completely unlike the poverty of the nineteenth century, which was placed along the same scale as wealth. Today inclusion and exclusion are incommensurable. I want to express how politically disturbing I find the increasing numbers of people who are socially excluded. There are people who are totally outside, even outside of any alternative, and this is without precedent. I have frequently worked with people like the ATD Fourth World [Agir Tous pour la Dignité Quart Monde]. There is now a fringe of marginal people who are no longer members of the social contract. How are they to be integrated? By helping them to find work, housing? But, precisely, looking for work or housing implies that one belongs to the social body. This is a big question posed to Western societies: can they integrate everyone? I don’t know if this is inscribed within the Marxist framework or if, instead, exclusion has taken the place of exploitation. In the latter case, are the same descriptions, the same explanations, the same remedies still valid?

It remains to be seen whether exclusion takes the place of exploitation or whether it is the form of exploitation pushed to extreme, something like the modern version of the old concept of Lumpenproletariat about which so many contradictory things have been written…

I am thinking here of a text that was fundamental, despite its narrowness and its excesses – the Communist Manifesto of 1848. The hypothesis is that the proletariat are part of the social circle because they had to organize themselves into a class among the other classes. Those excluded today are no longer capable of forming a class. They are “outsiders” [“hors classe”]. This raises new questions concerning parliamentary democracy, majoritarian democracy. There now exists a sufficiently large number of people who are satisfied to no longer allow the disadvantaged to become the focus of a political alternative. This is for me a matter of serious concern. I had begun to reflect on this problem during my years in America. While American society still has a large capacity for integration, those who have left the system no longer constitute even an alternative. I do recognize how the American Democratic Party has served for a long time to represent the minorities it includes. In this way, minorities were directly part of the system. Today in the United States, a quarter of the population lives in real poverty. In France, the problem of exclusion concerns all the parties on the Left, including the Communist Party. Is it around those most disadvantaged but who still remain part of the system, or starting with those who are outside the system, that the possibility can be envisaged of joining the excluded together with the included who are at the bottom of the social ladder?