Samuel Lelievre

When examining the relationship of Ricoeur’s philosophy to the field of ontology and metaphysics, a text entitled “Discourse, Metaphysics and Hermeneutics of the Self” may attract attention as it provides useful and meaningful insights. This text is a reworking of a better-known text, “De la métaphysique à la morale” (1993), but remains different by focusing on analyses relating to an ontology and metaphysics of human action and agency, and considers the speculative structure of a hermeneutics of the self constituted since Oneself as Another (1990). Originating from a conference held at the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (Spain) in 1993 and 1995, this text was first published in 1998 in the proceedings of that conference; the present version aims at making it accessible again and improving its editorial form.

“Discourse, Metaphysics,and Hermeneutics of the Self” deals with the connection between the hermeneutics of the self, as constituted in the ethical-anthropological framework of Oneself as Another (1990), and Ricoeur’s conception of a metaphysics of human agency as developed within this period of his work. It relates to his inquiries in the fields of ontology and metaphysics, from the lectures entitled Être, essence et substance chez Platon et Aristote (1953-1954), up to “De la métaphysique à la morale” (1993) published in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale, via the article “Ontologie” (1972) for Encyclopaedia Universalis, the last chapter of The Rule of Metaphor (1975), and the first section of the conclusions to the third volume of Time and Narrative (1985). Ricœur aims at determining a specific kind of philosophical discourse as a common ground for the perspectives stemming from a hermeneutic phenomenology and from a more speculative ontological-metaphysical research.

“Discourse, Metaphysics,and Hermeneutics of the Self” deals with the connection between the hermeneutics of the self, as constituted in the ethical-anthropological framework of Oneself as Another (1990), and Ricoeur’s conception of a metaphysics of human agency as developed within this period of his work. It relates to his inquiries in the fields of ontology and metaphysics, from the lectures entitled Être, essence et substance chez Platon et Aristote (1953-1954), up to “De la métaphysique à la morale” (1993) published in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale, via the article “Ontologie” (1972) for Encyclopaedia Universalis, the last chapter of The Rule of Metaphor (1975), and the first section of the conclusions to the third volume of Time and Narrative (1985). Ricœur aims at determining a specific kind of philosophical discourse as a common ground for the perspectives stemming from a hermeneutic phenomenology and from a more speculative ontological-metaphysical research.

The aim of this text by Ricœur is to link memory and narrativity using the example of architecture. “I adopt,” he writes, “the most general definition of memory – the one found in Aristotle’s short text entitled On Memory and Reminiscence, which draws on notes, particularly from Plato’s Theaetetus, concerning the eikôn, the image: “making the absent present”, “making the absent present”; as well as the notation that distinguishes between two kinds of absence: the absent as simply unreal, which would therefore be the imaginary, and the absent-that-once-was, the before, the anterior, the proteron. The latter is, for Aristotle, the distinctive mark of memory on absence: it is therefore a question of making present the absence that once was. I found a great similarity of thought at the two extremes of our Western history, between the Ancients – with this idea of absence made present and anteriority – and a statement by Heidegger, which I hold dear, regardless of my distance from his idea of the being-towards-death: the idea that we must split our concept of the past into what he calls the past, the “vergangen”, and what has been, the “gewesen”. At the same time, we do justice to the definition of the Ancients, because the previously-present is marked twice grammatically: it is no longer, but it once was. And it seems to me that it is the glory of architecture to make present not what is no longer, but what has been through what is no longer.

The aim of this text by Ricœur is to link memory and narrativity using the example of architecture. “I adopt,” he writes, “the most general definition of memory – the one found in Aristotle’s short text entitled On Memory and Reminiscence, which draws on notes, particularly from Plato’s Theaetetus, concerning the eikôn, the image: “making the absent present”, “making the absent present”; as well as the notation that distinguishes between two kinds of absence: the absent as simply unreal, which would therefore be the imaginary, and the absent-that-once-was, the before, the anterior, the proteron. The latter is, for Aristotle, the distinctive mark of memory on absence: it is therefore a question of making present the absence that once was. I found a great similarity of thought at the two extremes of our Western history, between the Ancients – with this idea of absence made present and anteriority – and a statement by Heidegger, which I hold dear, regardless of my distance from his idea of the being-towards-death: the idea that we must split our concept of the past into what he calls the past, the “vergangen”, and what has been, the “gewesen”. At the same time, we do justice to the definition of the Ancients, because the previously-present is marked twice grammatically: it is no longer, but it once was. And it seems to me that it is the glory of architecture to make present not what is no longer, but what has been through what is no longer.

When examining the relationship of Ricoeur’s philosophy to the field of ontology and metaphysics, a text entitled “Discourse, Metaphysics and Hermeneutics of the Self” may attract attention as it provides useful and meaningful insights. This text is a reworking of a better-known text, “De la métaphysique à la morale” (1993), but remains different by focusing on analyses relating to an ontology and metaphysics of human action and agency, and considers the speculative structure of a hermeneutics of the self constituted since Oneself as Another (1990). Originating from a conference held at the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (Spain) in 1993 and 1995, this text was first published in 1998 in the proceedings of that conference; the present version aims at making it accessible again and improving its editorial form.

Ricoeur’s philosophical project can be broadly termed as a philosophical anthropology. Within this context, a main role is given to the issue of imagination through the resources of phenomenology, hermeneutics, and reflexive philosophy. The issue of picture, however, remains quite unknown and has not been much questioned; it might even be undermined by being reduced to the context of reproductive imagination as opposed to that of productive imagination within Ricoeur’s anthropology, and due to the emphasis on the linguistic relationship to sense or meaning. Yet, instead of opposing the plane of picture to the plane of sense or meaning, an articulated connection between those two planes should be sought. The issue of symbolism opened by Ricoeur in his Philosophie de la volonté provides the starting point for our investigation. From that early hermeneutics on to La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, via De l’interprétation. Essai sur Freud, La Métaphore vive, and Temps et récit, one could also consider that picture makes us think. But the issue of symbolism cannot be distinguished from that of imagination. One also has to link two paths of Ricoeur’s philosophy through the issue of symbolism, one that is orientated in the path of hermeneutics – the progression to the standpoint set by Du texte à l’action –, another that links the project of a philosophical anthropology to the fields of art and aesthetics. The research is thus structured around four parts. A first part is focused on the articulated connection between Ricoeur’s philosophy of imagination and philosophical aesthetics by addressing the hermeneutical prospect as the condition for the effectiveness of this connection. Extending this hermeneutical stance, a second part seeks to establish a bond between Ricoeur’s notion of a critical hermeneutics and the issue of picture. A third part, concurrent with the context of a critical hermeneutics, aims to consider imagination as mediating the plane of art and the plane of experience by referring to Ricoeur’s reading of analytic philosophy and, more specifically, analytic philosophy of art. Relying on the previous parts, a fourth part finally addresses the field of film, articulating ontological, narrative, and social layers to a philosophical hermeneutics.

While inheriting from Husserl’s phenomenology, Ricoeur aims at determining a philosophical anthropology. Imagination can then be thought as what makes possible a mediation dealing with the disproportion between sensibility and understanding; it can be seen as one of the guiding threads of Ricoeur’s anthropology before becoming a theme or a field of analysis. But if this philosophy of imagination encompasses the issue of image, to the point of making these two terms mostly interchangeable, it too includes a specific philosophy of image, which must be recovered. In this perspective, one could follow a path going from the most general standpoint (the elaboration of a philosophy of image in the wake of a phenomenology of imagination) to the most particular one (the recognition of the image as a symbol, sign or trace) while determining the role of a symbolic mediation related to image.

Referring back the question of an identity of African films to the notions of hybridization and nomadism, this chapter describes the articulation between what African films are and discourses on those films as well as the historical evolution of this articulation. We thus place ourselves in the perspective of a history of discourses on African films, not in a history of these cinemas as such or in the framework of a normative, critical perspective. In so doing, we are neither on the ideological plane of an out-of-reach gaze that has sometimes become the source of a unclear discourse in the name of the defense of an “other”, nor on a formalist plane that incautiously would not be taking into account the historicity of African cinematic practices. Rather, it is a question of arriving, both politically and ethically, at the point where a recognition of African films is at stake, and insofar as the very history of these films remains opaque until we understand that what is at stake stands mostly at the level of such recognition.

The relevance of Ricoeur’s philosophy can now be recognized in the fields of aesthetics and philosophy of art. Although these fields are not at the core of his work, Ricoeur’s research in philosophy of action and toward a philosophy of imagination could also be extended to these areas; and if his conception of imagination determines that of action, the latter is not limited to the fields of ethics, politics or history. Michaël Fœssel recently remarked that “not enough attention has been paid to this occurrence of the term “aesthetic” in [Ricoeur’s] work, which, all things considered, rarely uses it”. Having this in mind, this issue of Etudes Ricœuriennes / Ricoeur Studies attempts to read anew this work. New interpretations of Ricoeur’s best-known works, and mainly of The Rule of the Metaphor and Time and Narrative, can be combined, superimposed and even confronted with lesser-known texts or those confined to the margins. Aesthetics and philosophy of art, coming from Ricoeur’s path, could even have the task of recalling the density of his main works and showing, moreover, that there are no minor texts by Ricoeur on this subject-matter.

In 1971, Cavell published The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, which anticipated the convergence between cinema and philosophy. But while Cavell can be linked to a philosophical turn in film studies — particularly after the 1979 expanded edition of The World Viewed — he first carved out his own path, relying on his expertise on Wittgenstein and philosopher of ordinary language, while also referring to Kant, Freud, Heidegger, and the “continental” field. In doing so, Cavell's perspective — a little bit like that of Deleuze but in a more positive way or more directly linked to aesthetic issues and recent philosophical problems — refers to a new epistemological requirement: to move away from Continentals / Analytics great divide, which proves to be more of an (ideological) obstacle than a means in getting knowledge progress in general and that of film especially. One of the main contribution of Daniel Yacavone's book, Film Worlds: A Philosophical Aesthetics of Cinema, lies in its response to this requirement. It would not seem to seek for a common ground to Continentals and Anatytics but rather to connect them to what would be relevant and useful for an aesthetic understanding of the medium, thereby revisiting certain contributions of film theory. The concept of “world” is playing a central role in this regard.

The expression “grafting of hermeneutics onto phenomenology”, which Ricœur coined, is meant to characterize his hermeneutic phenomenology or Ricœurian approaches the fields of phenomenology and hermeneutics. However, the expression seems to have been quite misunderstood and therefore may have led to various misunderstandings about Ricœur’s approach and its relationship to phenomenology and hermeneutics. The term “grafting” refers to a differentiation between two methods and domains, where one method and domain is completing another method and domain. However, it is less the difference between phenomenology and hermeneutics that is at stake than the difference between the phenomenological origin of Ricœur’s hermeneutics and his project of a philosophical anthropology. More often this aim is overlooked by critics who rely on their expertise in either phenomenology or in hermeneutics. By so doing their commentary of Ricœur’s philosophy suffers certain limitations.

Johann Michel’s Homo Interpretans aims at giving an account of the common ground to the question of interpretation, in a general sense covering ordinary as well as scholarly practices and conceptions, and to the question of philosophical anthropology. Important aspects of Ricoeur’s philosophy are also discussed throughout the book. The author’s thesis is that interpretation takes place whenever an understanding of the world is missing, be it on an ordinary way or in a more elaborate relationship to knowledge. This common ground gives rise to an interpretive anthropology which rearticulates the connection between philosophical discourse, the human and social sciences, and hermeneutics. Finally, the universality of homo interpretans is discussed as it relates to this project of reformulating hermeneutics and the difference between the more ordinary, exploratory level of interpretation and the level of interpretations institutionalized in human and social sciences.

The article draws a parallel between Ricoeur’s critique of Heidegger’s conception of temporality and the demand for a more general critique of Heidegger’s philosophy. If Ricoeur denied a proximity between Being and Time and Time and Narrative, he placed himself within a philosophical vein that addresses Heidegger’s first philosophy. But our knowledge of Heidegger’s Complete Works, including the “Black Notebooks,” requires integrating criticism of links between Heidegger and national-socialist ideology. In addition to various critical contents within Time and Narrative and developments related to the social sciences, the explicit reference to scientific concepts of time must also be highlighted. Ricoeur breaks with Heidegger’s philosophy of time as inseparable from Ricoeur’s reformulation of the issue of being and attempts to determine a conception of time engaging an ontological and epistemological critique of Being and Time.

The goal of this article is to focus on the concept of reading in Paul Ricœur’s Time and Narrative, through the notions of triple mimesis and refiguration, in continuity with previous investigations on the issue of hermeneutics and in phenomenology. While relying on developments in philosophical hermeneutics since Gadamer, Ricœur’s concept of reading might work as a paradigm allowing to link the layers of interpretation and reception that build out the aesthetic experience. In this way, analyses come into play that make an initial philosophical framework a more complicated one and that allow to extend such paradigm to non-verbal or non-linguistic fields. This article is structured in two sections. The first section aims to specify the general framework of Ricœur’s hermeneutics, to review the critical reception of Time and Narrative, and to recall of the constant correlation between refiguration and temporality. The second section more specifically considers the fourth chapter in the second part of Time and Narrative’s third volume (French edition) wherein the articulation between reading and aesthetics is developed. However, a critical re-evaluation of this latter development must be provided not only in order to recognise some limitations to Ricœur’s approach of refiguration but also to see how the hermeneutical approach is, despite of all, what allows a mediation between the aesthetic and artistic.

“Architecture and Narrativity” is a paper delivered in Paris in 1996 under the title “De la mémoire” for the Groupe de réflexion des architects and a meeting organized by the Direction de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine (now Direction générale du patrimoine). The text has been then published in 1998 in the journal Urbanisme. Although architecture is not usually studied by Ricoeur, he nevertheless often integrated it into a body of thought that he defined as a philosophical anthropology (and developed through a hermeneutics of the long path). In Histoire et vérité, Ricoeur was able to define architecture either as a “world inserted into the world” or as a mode of “incorporation” of the “images of man that make up the whole reality of culture”. From Temps et récit (1983-1985) up to La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (2000), he developed further a philosophy of narrative; he too extended such views to other areas of human agency. “Architecture and Narrativity” is one way through which Ricoeur implements his narrative paradigm in continuity with his approach to history and anthropology.

Ricœur’s philosophy never locates itself directly in the field of philosophical aesthetics inasmuch as philosophical aesthetics never arises as a field of major questioning and discursive development for Ricœur’s philosophy or as a field that would guide that philosophy. However, Ricœur maintains an ongoing but complex connection with aesthetics throughout his philosophical work. Here we defend the thesis that there are difficulties relating both to the complexity of Ricœur’s philosophy and to the crisis situation of aesthetics as an autonomous field of philosophical inquiry. A more direct confrontation with philosophical aesthetics, such as that developed by analytic philosophy and critical theory today, is necessary in order to be aware of this connection between Ricœur’s philosophy and aesthetics. It then appears that if Ricœur’s philosophy makes it possible to maintain a certain autonomy of the field of aesthetics inherited from Kant, it is not through developing some unlikely “Ricœurian aesthetic” but thanks to a Ricœurian philosophy of aesthetics essentially determined on three levels: 1) the connection between poetics and aesthetics within a philosophy of imagination, 2) the connection between criticism and hermeneutics with regard the notions of text and distanciation, 3) the connection between ontology and communication that summarizes the two previous steps by combining phenomenological, analytic and critical perspectives. Thus it can be assumed that this autonomy of the field of aesthetics is possible only at a horizon of meaning determined by Ricœur’s philosophical anthropology: at the axiological level, the field of aesthetics differs upstream from the field of poetics and downstream from the field of ethics; at the ontological level, Ricœur’s philosophy of aesthetics concerns a region that is both intermediate between and congruent to those treated by Ricœur’s philosophy of imagination and by Ricœur’s philosophy of action.

Ricoeur’s reading of analytic philosophy is part of a philosophical plan that focuses on deepening his inquiry into various thematics, some theoretical in nature, others concerned with the history of philosophy. On the theoretical plane, Ricoeur’s interest in the analytic tradition is rooted in the problem of the relationship between language and the world; as regards the history of philosophy, he is interested in the shift from a transcendental philosophy to a contemporary philosophy that is concerned with the world of experience and the actions of a fallible and capable human being. From this perspective, a possible way into a Ricœurian reading of analytic philosophy is through two authors: Ludwig Wittgenstein and Nelson Goodman. In both cases, Ricoeur does not so much oppose the approaches and results of an "analytic philosophy" to those of a "continental philosophy" as seek to renew his reflection on language, imagination, and reference. We can account for this evolution in two stages: first, we will focus on the comparison that Ricoeur makes between the philosophy of the later Husserl and the philosophy of the later Wittgenstein; second, we will reexamine Ricoeur’s reading of Goodman’s general theory of reference.

“Architecture and Narrativity” is a paper delivered in Paris in 1996 under the title “De la mémoire” for the Groupe de réflexion des architects and a meeting organized by the Direction de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine (now Direction générale du patrimoine). The text has been then published in 1998 in the journal Urbanisme. Although architecture is not usually studied by Ricoeur, he nevertheless often integrated it into a body of thought that he defined as a philosophical anthropology (and developed through a hermeneutics of the long path). In Histoire et vérité, Ricoeur was able to define architecture either as a “world inserted into the world” or as a mode of “incorporation” of the “images of man that make up the whole reality of culture”. From Temps et récit (1983-1985) up to La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (2000), he developed further a philosophy of narrative; he too extended such views to other areas of human agency. “Architecture and Narrativity” is one way through which Ricoeur implements his narrative paradigm in continuity with his approach to history and anthropology.

Cinema can be considered a particularly relevant and instructive example of a discourse and practice that refer back to each of the three great domains of imagination identified by Ricœur—discourse, articulation between a theoretical level and a practical level, and the social imaginary. While the aim of this article is to focus on the third level, a more comprehensive approach to the ideas of cinematic narrative and social imagination, drawn from Ricœur, requires us to go through the other two levels again. It is particularly necessary to find the terms of a Ricœurian philosophy of imagination in the articulation between emplotment and representation, operative since Time and Narrative, and a later approach to the notion of cinematic narrative. A critical relationship to the social and political imaginary can eventually be found through cinema. But, it is a matter of understanding a transition from a critical stance inherited from the philosophical tradition to a critical movement internal to cinematic practices: while taking into account the notion of narrative, this critical movement can bring to the fore, in a new way, the notion of image, contributing to its reappraisal within a philosophy of imagination. The last section of the article is particularly interested in the special relationship between cinema and historicity.