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Ricoeur's Ethics of Method

A method is always the vehicle of ethical presuppositions. And ethics truly

appears when its methodology itself becomes an ethical exercice, an

exercice in responsability. This text begins with the role of the "aporia" in

Ricoeur's thought. It then underscores the respect brought to the questions

put by others, and thus to the plurality of possible questions. Further on,

Ricoeur's treatment of the "remainder", that which each method leaves at

its edges, is focussed upon. Finally these various figures are interpretated in

the perspective of the implicit anthropology of this ethics.

When one speaks of method and of efficacity of method, one is supposed to

abstract entirely from all ethical preferences. As if the true problem were

not often intermediate, mixed, in the choice and the adaptation of methods

in relation to the subject to be treated : a method that is always the vehicleof ethical presuppositions. Ricoeur is too kierkegaardian, too spinozist, we

might say too much a hermeneut to neglect this point. Not simply because

he is the leader of the hermeneutical school in contemporary French

thought, but because he has tried troughout his life to bring his own

presuppositions rather Protestant, and rather socialist (in the Latin or

Romanic sense of this term, in French, Italian, and Spanish contexts) to a

level of clarity at wich they can stand as a possible and viable choice.

When we speak of ethics, our interlocutor tends to expect us to come

rapidly to the point, and to declare our "values". Paul Ricoeur, for his part,delays results and takes so many detours that the interlocutor wonders

suddenly if it is not the path itself, the method, wich becomes an ethical

exercice, an exercice in responsability or perhaps in "interrogativity"!

Ricoeur is too socratic, too cartesian, too kantian, let us say too critical not

to proceed in this way. Not simply because of his professional habits as a

philosopher, but because existentially he cannot do otherwise. As Roland

Barthes would say, that is his style.

Here, then, rather than concerning ourselves with the values that Ricoeur

endorses, we want to examine those he practices. His way of treating

subjects (and of treating other authors) may teach us more about his ethicsthan his writings (for instance History and Truth, From text to action, or

Oneself as Another*). And inversely, this implicit ethics may help us

understand how he has been able to elaborate a "critical hermeneutics" or

something like a "structuralism of the event" (titles wich appear to be

contradictory). In its sobriety, his implicit ethics reveals in this sense

something like the soul of Ricoeur's method.

Paul Ricoeur will be eighty years old this winter, and his bibliography alone

needs 300 pages! In fact, like Emmanuel Kant, he has published more in the

last ten years than in his whole life. My discussion today will base itself onlyon quotations wich will help, in passing, to situate some of the outlines of
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Ricoeur's thought, functioning a bit like small pieces of a large puzzle,

although I cannot hope, of course, to fill in the vast picture completely. I

would like to begin with the role of the aporia, the impasse, in Ricoeur's

method. I shall continue then by underscoring the respect brought to the

questions posed by others, and thus to the plurality of possible questions. I

shall move forward then by way of the attention Ricoeur focuses on the"remainder", on that which each method leaves at its edges. Finally, I shall

regroup these different figures under the heading of an implicit

anthropology which shows through in all these moves.

I. Prelude on the sense of the aporia

We will start, then, from certain limits of method. If method is path or

passage, Ricoeur has passed his life in exploring the passes which make it

possible to link ideological continents and theoretical fields, and in showing

that "a passe": that is, these continents and fields fit together as parts of

the same world. What in each particular discourse may be totalitarian is

thus reshaped, bent to fit within the real. This bending reflects the limits of

all method, and these limits are encountered in impasses. Ricoeur has

strongly developed this sense of the aporia. One can even say that the

passages take their meaning only in relation to the impasses.

Here is an example ; Ricoeur is speaking about witness, and on the topic of

the ascription or attribution to oneself of an action :

"The aporias attaching to ascription bear witness to this gap between two

degrees of selfdesignation. As in generally the case with the mostintractable aporias, these aporias of ascription do not bring a verdict of

condemnation against the philosophy which discovers them. On the

contrary, they should be reckoned to its credit".

And Ricoeur adds in a note :

"Time and Narrative, volume three, is entirely constructed on the

relationship between an aporetics of temporality and the retort of a poetics

of narrativity"*.

Moreover Time and narrative itself concludes with aporias. Ricoeur oftendevotes similar discreet praise to the aporia.

One may even ask if the aporia is not transcendental, constitutive: in the

case of the critique of ideology, Ricoeur writes that it is

"impossible for an individual, and even more for a group to formulate

everything, thematize everyting, pose everything as an object of thought. It

is this impossibility to which I shall return at length in criticizing the idea of

total authority. Now it certainly seems that the nontransparence of our

cultural codes is a necessary condition of the production of social

messages"*.
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From where does Ricoeur draw this sense of the aporia? I see three possible

models. The first, the most eminent, is that of Husserl*. In his inquiry into

the transcendental ego, into the deepest levels of phenomenology, Husserl

is led in his Crisis into an impasse : the subject always already belongs to a

"lebenswelt", a lifeworld. This impasse in the direction of the origin may be

thought of as the great educator of contemporary French philosophy :Maurice MerleauPonty and Paul Ricoeur, of course, but also Emmanuel

Lvinas and Michel Henry, Jacques Derrida, JeanFranois Lyotard, Gilles

Deleuze and JeanLuc Marion, they are all haunted by this absence

(differently of course). It determines what one might call the reorientation of

philosophy. Ricoeur writes, for example :

"I wish in effect to lead hermeneutical reflection to the point at which it

calls, by an inner aporia, for an important reorientation"*.

The second model, probably a good deal farther below the surface, is that of

Nietzsche. If the will to truth is capable of destroying everything, veil after

veil, to reach its goal, and if it discovers that its goal is in fact nothing but

this very destruction, the sole way out of the impasse is turn around again

and create : to accept that truth itself is poetic. It seems to me that the

project of a "poetics of the will", announced by Ricoeur in 1950, responds to

this aporia. And we have just seen the link between aporetics and poetics (in

the case of temporality and narrativity).

The third model is that of Plato, whose dialogues lead to a crisis and to a

sort of metanoa, a complete reorientation of the way of seeing, a

reorientation which is, says Ricoeur,

"implied in the aporetical method of a goodly number of the dialogues. It is

not only a question of holding back the true answer and thus of focusing

attention on the question itself, of stripping and in a sense cleansing the

questionning process ; the goal is not even simply to join an ethical function

to this critical function, breaking the pretentions of false and superficial

philosophers by means of irony : it is a question, rather, of implanting in the

soul an emptiness, a night, an impotence, an absence which are the

preludes to the revelation"*.

Let us go even further : the revelation is perhaps the very absence ofrevelation. So it will appear, in any case, if we accept Ricoeur's claim that

"ontology is the promised land for a philosophy which begins with language

and with reflection, (but) like Moses, the speaking and reflecting subject can

only glimpse this land before dying"*.

The figure of RicoeurMoses thus comes to balance that of Ricoeur Ulysses,

navigator of all possible passages to attain Ithaca. For Ricoeur's ontological

Ithaca remains an Ithaca of hope. Here is where the ethical soul of the

method resides, something like an ethics of the questioning process : the

synthesis does not belong to us. We are "below the dividing line", in the

insurmountable conflict of interpretations.
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Ii. The pluralization of questions, and the respect of other points of

view

The sense of the aporia, finally, places the questioning process at the center

of philosophical activity. In what way is this step an ethical one ? Let us take

an example. Commenting on La mtaphore vive (The rule of metaphor),Ricoeur writes in the preface that this work...

"does not seek to replace rhetoric with semantics, and semantics with

hermeneutics, thus refuting one by the other ; rather, it tries to give

legitimacy to each point of view within the limits of the discipline which

corresponds to it, and to found the systematic linkage of points of view on

the progression from the word to the sentence and from the sentence to

discourse"*.

This methodological pluralization of points of view is first of all a

hermeneutical postulate. One can only understand a text, a doctrine, or atheory if one understands them as responses to questions, as Gadamer

sayd, and if one accepts the irreducible diversity of possible questions.

"A hermeneutical philosophy is one which accepts all the demands of this

long detour and renounces the dream of a total mediation, at the end of

which reflection would enjoy intellectual intuition in the transparence to

itself of an absolute subject"*.

The phenomenological method of "eidetic variation", by which one varies

the profiles of a thing in order to seize its being or essence, is here taken up

again, but reversed : far from searching for an invariable identity, it is in the

variations, in the very conflict of interpretations that existence is to be

interpreted. Against Heidegger whose hermeneutics is not made to resolve

the problems of literary, historical, or social criticism, but rather to

"dissolve" these problems Ricoeur writes that the coherent figure of the

being which we are "is given nowhere else than in this dialectic of

interpretations"*.

But it is not only an hermeneutical gesture. Moving to another register, this

pluralization of methods is seen very clearly in the ethical section of Oneself

as Another*. One begins there from the properly ethical aim which is that ofthe subject desiring his (or her) own good, human action inscribing itself in

this irreducible plurality of the desirable. The method here is teleological.

But diverse desires can be incompatible : the moral norms appears then to

give the rule, which has as object less the attainment of the good, that the

prevention of evil, a concern which obliges me to take others into account.

The method there is deontological. Now, a conflict between contradictory

moral imperatives of equal legitimacy can arise (although Kant refuses to

aknowledge it); practical wisdom emerges in these tragic limitsituations,

and it must then clear a path toward a judgment capable of taking into

account the incompatible points of view. The method then is somewhatpoetic.
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It is necessary, then, to pass through this apprenticeship in questioning : we

learn thereby to shed the exclusivity of our questions, and to divide the right

to question into as many legitimacies as there are angles of attack or points

of view. This wish, that no point of view should be "sacrificed" in the conflict

of interpretations, is found once again in Ricoeur's political philosophy.

Beyond the fundamental accord on an idea of democracy as a setting inwich conflicts are recognized and negociated, this political issue may be

seen as a discret point of discord between Ricoeur and such thinker as

Claude Lefort or Jrgen Habermas : for if the points of view not taken into

account must be ceaselessly reintegrated into political debate, this debate

must nonetheless proceed with the awareness that tere are always points of

view which will escape its grap.

There is "always already" a "debt" toward others who do not or not yet, or

no longer belong to the community, and without whom the social contract

and deliberation are not complete, not fully valid, not totally "authorized"*.There are always unrepresented, and perhaps unrepresentable, points of

view. This lack does not disqualify democracy, but attests its problematic,

debatable, relative, and fragile character. This is why beyond democracy,

there must be a more fundamental solidarity with the victims of all places

and all times, with that "community of the shaken" of which Jan Patocka

speaks*.

This feeling of indebtedness is probably what pushes Ricoeur to always seek

to honor his predecessors. Rarely, at least in France, has a great philosopher

been so concerned with giving each person his (or her) due. This is what

distinguishes him from authors like Lvinas and Perelman, who writewithout references:

"I try to take a foothold in the philosophical tradition. I think in effect that it

is one of the tasks of philosophy always to carry forward a critical

recapitulation of its own heritage, even if it is a crushing task to confront

giants such as Kant and Hegel"*.

Methodically, Ricoeur seeks to formulate the question to which the cited

author is responding, the point of view which he (or she) introduces in the

debate. This formulation has the value of approbation. Then, no less

methodically, he seeks to point out the questions left hanging by the author,

the problems that he (or she) raises, and it is at this point that he "leaves"

the author, separating himself from him (or her) in order to move on.

Or, to put it finally in another way , as a philosopher of "reading", Ricoeur

affirms that

"to understand oneself is to understand oneself before the text and to

receive from it the conditions of a self, other than the 'I' which comes to

reading".

Thus the reader, because he (or she) has suspended the exclusivity of his

(or her) point of view, receives a subjectivity augmented by the...
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"opening of new possibilities which is the work in me of the stuff (la chose)

of the text"*.

In all the registers in which we exchange meaning, perspectives, readings,

visions of the world and of life, theoretical debates, political conflicts, etc.,

one can say that it is the progressive integration of others' questions,others' points of view, which reorganizes our own questions and points of

view, at each level, and without end. And this reorganization of our

intelligence is at the same time the reorganization of our conduct : it is at

once an ethical and a methodological progress, inseparably.

Iii. The hybridization of methods, and the respect of the

"remainder"

We can begin again with another metaphor, as frequently used as that of

the aporia, which is that of the graft or transplant. In a volume of the journal

Autrement, Ricoeur recounts his intellectual itinerary in these terms :

"This conjunction among phenomenology, linguistics, and analytical

philosophy in its least logicalist aspect, provided me with resources for

hybridization to which I owe a great deal"*.

This gardener's metaphor is not accidental and we find it again in the

preface to The conflict of interpretations :

"My aim here is to explore the paths opened up for contemporary

philosophy by what one could call the grafting of the hermeneutical problem

onto the phenomenological method".

In fact , onto each subject taken up will, evil, subject, meaning, metaphor,

narrative, history, political thought or ethics, law, etc. Ricoeur grafts

several methods, convinced apparently that only a hybrid method can rise

to the complexity of the subjects chosen.

Where is ethic in all of this ? Ricoeur develops, as we have noted previously,

an acute sens of the limits of each of the conceptual models he employs. To

such an extent, indeed, that he expands this feeling to the whole of

language, for language itself must recognize its limits :

"Individualization can be roughly characterized as the inverse process from

that of classification, which abolishes singularities in the service of the

concept (...) It is because we speak and think by concepts that language

must in some sense repair the loss which is consummated by

conceptualization"*.

It is onto this loss of individual qualities required by the construction of the

concept that there comes to graft itself a sort of supplement of construction,

or rather of deconstruction or reconstruction : anyway someting where

language lets place to a kind of concrete act. Still more exactly : it is at this

point that a graft is made of those supplementary procedures intended to

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indicate the infinite remainder which constitutes singularity (the singularity

of an individual person, of a work, of an event, and also of things).

In fact, the two operations, structuration and singularization, do not exclude

one another. On the contrary, they graft themselves onto each other : "One

can only individualize if one has already conceptualized". Ricoeur is veryclose here to the philosopher of science GillesGaston Granger, who defines

style as structuration of singularities and singularization of structures*. We

could develop here the respect of human works as style, considering both

the general structure and the meaningful singularities : that's what Ricoeur

is looking for in the narrative works of history and of fiction.

Basically, any theory leaves a residue which it cannot integrate without loss

or violence. The ethics of method consists in recognizing this remainder,

and in letting it be without attempting to reduce it : it is a question of

knowing one's limits*. And of giving play to other theories, complementary

or supplementary.

Let us take an other example ; speaking of John Rawls, Ricoeur writes:

"We can announce that it is in a purely procedural conception of justice that

such a formalization attains its goal. The question will be then if this

reduction to procedure does not leave a residue which requires a certain

return to a teleological point of view, but in the name of a demand to wich

these very procedures themselves lend a voice"*.

Another example : history is one of the places in which the sense of the

"remainder" must be sharpened. Offering, in the third volume of Time and

Narrative a typology of history history as reefectuation of the past in the

present (example : Collingwood); history as lesson in altarity and difference

(example : Michel de Certeau); history as analogue and figure (example :

Hayden White) Ricoeur writes that the passage from one to the other of

these models results from the impotence of any one of them to resolve in an

unilateral and exhaustive manner the enigma of representance. History

always leaves a loss, and this debt toward the dead makes of the historian

as carefully as he (or she) may reconstruct and "render" history, an

"insolvent debtor"*.

It is not sufficient, then, to say that the hybridization of methods is

necessary to "render" the subject one treats : this hybridization is an ethics

of our manner of treating our subjects*. We are supposed to make the

degree of complexity and heterogeneity of a discipline proportionate to the

requirements of its objects, without looking too rapidly for a clear unitary

theory*. here too method is ethic.

The preface of La mtaphore vive, like that of Soimme comme un autre,

had already accustomed us to this progressive widening of points of view

and problematics. One could say just as well that it is a matter, at each new

stage of the analysis, of the recovery of a remainder : marginal until that

moment, but which now passes to the center of attention. In this ethics of
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method, everything which is marginal must be potentially treatable as

central. For a given theoretical or discursive model, the remainder is the

index of the "whole", of the totality of the experience in which this model

inscribes itself. In this sense, the remainder is always more important than

that which has already been taken into account*. It is this remainder which

obliges us each time to complicate our methods and to reorganize the wholeof our conduct.

Iv. Anthropological postscript

In concluding, it seems to me that we can discern through these two series

of remarks the lineaments of a philosophical anthropology. This will not in

fact be surprising, if the manner in which we treat a subject also expresses

what we think that subject is. In the first series of observations, method and

the ethics of method are those of a questionning : to understand discourses

in relation to the questions which precede them, but also to bring out the

new questions which are born from the answers. This process is thus

dominated by an anthropology of the word, of the speaking subject,

participating with others in a conversation.

In the second series, wich looks at the hybridization of methods and the

concern for the remainder left by structuration, the method is that of a

structuration which knows that it is leaving a remainder, and of an

individualization which takes up this remainder and makes of it its object

and no longer its residue. This methodological style, as we can see, is

dominated by an anthropology of praxis, of work, of poetic making, of work

making, of action. Now Ricoeur, it seems to me, has never ceased holdingthese two anthropologies together, balancing them, each one in relation to

the other.

At the time of his article on "Work and Word" ("Travail et Parole", a text

from 1953, reprinted in History and Truth, it was above all a question of

defending the speaking subject against an excess of anthropology based on

work and technique. In his most recent texts, on narration as work or on the

political debate, it is a matter of defending the acting subject against the

excess of an anthropology of language in which everything would be

subjected to and made dependent upon argumentation, as it is a bit the

case with Habermas. Thus, the two ethics of method that we have observed

correspond well enough to a complete anthropology*.

These anthropological remarks would not constitute a conclusion if we did

not come back finally to the sense of the aporia, since it is from that notion

that we started out. In Ricoeur contemporary in this sense of Heidegger as

a reader of Kant the transcendental aporia is found when we reach back

from speech and action towards imagination, towards the schematization

which is their condition of possibility, and which we know is a hidden art or a

"blind spot"*. "The transcendental imagination remains an enigma". At the

most, what we can say is that this enigma has to do with temporality. Thisaporia in which the aporias of the thought of evil and of time converge in

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those of the imagination is probably at the heart of Ricoeur's thinking. It is

with this aporia as a point of departure that he turns towards a poetics of

the imagination. To state this idea with the theolo

gical metaphor : human beings are in the image of God, but we have no

such image ; it is precisely this empty space in our anthropoly which mustbe methodically preserved.

Olivier Abel

Publi dans Philosophy todayVol.37:1

(traduction par Alexander Irwin).

(merci de demander l'autorisation avant de reproduire cet article)

* History and Truth, Evanston (Ill): Northwestern University Press, 1965.

From Text to Action. Hermeneutics 2, Evanston (Ill): Northwestern Uni

versity Press, 1991. (see also Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences.

Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation, Cambridge : Cambridge

University Press, 1980). Oneself as Another, Chicago : The University of

Chicago Press, 1992.

* Soimme comme un autre, Paris Seuil 1990, p.118. One could multiply

the examples of significant aporias in Ricoeirs's work : "the whole of

Collingwood's entreprise shatters itself on the impossibility of passing from

the thought of the past as mine to the thought of the past as other" (Temps

et Rcit 3, Paris : Seuil 1985, p.211).

* "Sciences et Idologie", in Du texte l'action Paris Seuil 1986.

* It is well known that Ricoeur was the first to translate Husserl into French,

using a copy of Ideen during the four years that he spent in a prison camp in

Germany.

* Du texte l'action op.cit.p.75.

* Etre,essence et substance chez Platon et Aristote, Paris : SEDES 1982.

* Le conflit des interprtations, Paris : Seuil 1969, p.28. The Conflict of

Interpretations. Essays in hermeneutics, Evanston (Ill): Northwestern

University Press, 1974.

* La mtaphore vive, Paris : Seuil, 1975, p.12. The Rule of Metaphor. Multi

Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, Toronto :University of Toronto Press, 1977.
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* Du texte l'action, op.cit. p.32. However, Ricoeur offers a critique in the

same style when he denounces, on another front, what he calls the epis

temological trap: "A current argument is to say that ideology is a surface

discourse which ignores its own real motivations. The argument becomes

still more impressive when it opposes the unconscious character of these

real motivations to the simply conscious character of the public, officialmotivations (...). But this elimination of subjectivity in the case of historical

agents does not guarantee that the sociologist himor herself has attained

a discourse without a subject" (ibid, p.325).

* Le Conflit des Interprtations, op.cit. p.27.

* Oneself as Another, op.cit., studies 7,8,9.

* "Pouvoir et violence", Lectures 1, Paris : Seuil 1991, p.41.

* "Jan Patocka et le nihilisme", Lectures 1 p.89.

* Du texte l'action, op.cit. p.237. In fact Ricoeur is also quite criticist

against authors like Derrida for whom philosophy is always something in the

margin of others texts.

* Du texte l'action p.31, 132.

* Autrement 1988, n_102, p.177.

* Soimme comme un autre, op.cit. p.40.

* GillesGaston Granger Essai d'une philosophie du style, Paris : ArmandColin, 1968.

* This is what Ricoeur shows in his debate with Claude Levi Strauss:

"Structuralism must be treated as an explanation which was limited at first,

then extended bit by bit, following the lead of the problems themselves : the

awareness of the validity of a method is never separable from the

awareness of its limits. It is in order to be fair to this method, and above

allin order to let myself be taught by it, that I shall seize it in its movement

of extension, beginning from an indisputably valid kernel, rather than to

consider it in its final stage, beyond a certain critical point at which,perhaps, it loses the sense of its limits" Le Conflit des interpretations, p.34.

* Soimme comme un autre, p.265.

* Temps et Rcit 3, p.204, 206, 220.

* To recognize that history is always a mixture bringing together pure

procedures of verifiable documentation and the simple narrations by which

an individual or communal subject forms an identity ; to recognize that

every narrative is a mixture between a plot and other diverse elements ; to

recognize that politics is a mixture involving ethical orientations toward the
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common good and the taking into account of economic and geographical

contexts.

* Du texte l'action, p.303.

* This approach is present throughout the whole of Ricoeur's work. it is very

explicit in his brief essay on evil (Le mal, Geneva : Labor et Fides, 1986).

One can think, explain, and sometimes even "justify" evil, and this is

necessary if one wishes not to panic, and not to risk taking any arbitrary

object for something evil. But evil remains as an enigma which no longer

calls for an explanation, but instead for a response : it is necessary to act

against evil, to try to reduce as much as possible the evil that human

beings perpetrate against one another through ignorance or malevolence,

laziness or stupidity. But it is true nonetheless that evil is felt, and that if all

human violence were eliminated, there would remain the enigma of pure

suffering, that suffering which exceed all explanation and all action.

* In a work which dates from 1964, and which is entitled precisely The

Gesture and the Word (Le geste et la parole Paris : A.Michel, 1964), te

anthropologist LeroiGourhan shows how at the same time the hand deta

ches itself from the ground and the mouth detaches itself from prehension.

It is in this separation tat a space is opened for intermediaries such as tools,

words, signs, images : the world of our representations. For it certainly

appears true that our current anthropologies are amputated. Our crisis is

perhaps that between the "man of words", where all is language and

communication without work, and the "homo faber", for whom everything is

technique and work without speech. And there is here a double pretentionto hegemony : that of work and of intrumentaltechnical action over the

word ; and that of language and of communicative action over work. But

against universal instrumentalization, there exist infinite questions left to

speech, and against universal communication, there exist infinite

singularities left to the hand. Emancipation is the free play of the word and

the hand, their relative autonomy, and the respect of the complete

humanity to which both contribute.

* Ricoeur rehearses this idea at lenght in L'homme faillible, Paris : Aubier,

1960, p.59. Fallible Man, Chicago : Gateway Editions, 1965.
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