Alessandro Colleoni

Le analisi che Paul Ricoeur ha dedicato alla tematica dell’immaginazione propongono una netta distinzione tra la sua dimensione produttiva e quella riproduttiva, di esplicita derivazione kantiana. Tale divaricazione sembra portare in alcuni testi all’identificazione della prima con il solo ambito linguistico e della seconda con ogni situazione che implichi un legame tra immaginazione e materiale percettivo, il che significherebbe abbandonare la prospettiva fenomenologica a favore di una visione unicamente ermeneutica. Sulla base di una proposta di stampo fenomenologico che cerca di superare questo divario, si propone una rilettura degli studi ricoeuriani sulla metafora e di quelli sul racconto individuando in particolare in questi ultimi una serie di elementi che vanno in questa stessa direzione.

The confrontation with the human and social sciences is one of the main characteristics of Paul Ricoeur’s philosophical thought. It represents an important resource for the Cogito that has experienced suspicion and must therefore face the need to understand itself through scientific explanation. However, Ricoeurian thinking also rejects any reductionism, considering that it is essential to maintain a dimension of meaning independent of explanation. If this dimension is denied, the sciences themselves lose their logical coherence. The aim of this article is to show how Ricoeur was able to hold together these two apparently irreconcilable needs. The analysis is based in particular on Freud and Philosophy (De l’interprétation. Essai sur Freud) from 1965, a book that can be seen both as the birthplace of this “impossible conciliation” and as a model for the author’s later works in setting up interdisciplinary dialogues. To exemplify the presence of this same argumentative structure in other contexts, the article ends with a reference to Ricoeur’s analysis of the relationship between philosophy and the critique of ideologies, as presented in his Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, which he held ten years after the publication of the book on Freud.

Le concept wittgensteinien de « voir comme » joue un rôle important dans plusieurs analyses de Paul Ricœur consacrées à la littérature et à la dimension sociale de l’action humaine. Un parcours à travers ces analyses met en évidence à la fois continuités et ruptures entre les différents usages de ce concept proposés par Ricœur. On montre alors la fécondité du concept en l’appliquant à un autre contexte, celui de la traduction. Les courts articles rassemblés sous le titre Sur la traduction (2004) invitent à une investigation plus approfondie de ce thème.

The debate on human rights is one of the themes that Ricoeur discusses, in Oneself as Another, while examining the practical wisdom and the dialectic that characterizes it between “the requirement of universality” and “the recognition of contextual limitations”. This shows, above all, his awareness both of the difficulty and the importance of justifying the protection of fundamental freedoms and capacities, in particular considering the accusations of eurocentrism that this struggle has received. He was convinced that one cannot remain indifferent to the “cry of the victims”: the constitutive vulnerability of human beings requires a defence which must cross the political borders. However, the concept of “humanity” in this context remains problematic, especially in a hermeneutical framework. In order to find a clearer foundation for this thesis, we will look for fruitful elements in a dialogue with Martha Nussbaum’s theory of “capabilities” and in Ricoeur’s early phenomenology of the will.