1 Ricoeur, Paul, “What Is a Text? Explanation and Interpretation,” in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, edited and translated by Thompson, John B. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 145–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Ricoeur, Paul, Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Seuil, 1990)Google Scholar. English translation, Oneself as Another, translated by Kathleen Blarney (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992).

3 Ricoeur, “What Is a Text?” p. 158.

4 Ricoeur, Paul, “Phenomenology and Hermeneutics,” in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, edited and translated by Thompson, John B. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 113.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Ricoeur, “What Is a Text?” p. 158.

6 Ricoeur, Paul, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, translated by Czerny, Robert, with Mclaughlin, Kathleen and Costello, John, SJ (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), pp. 68, 70.Google Scholar

7 Ibid., p. 74.

8 Ibid., p. 75.

9 Ibid., p. 220.

10 Ibid., p. 189.

11 Ibid., p. 241.

12 Ibid., p. 244.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid., p. 246.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid.

17 Ricoeur, Paul, Time and Narrative, Vols. 1 and 2, translated by McLaughlin, Kathleen and Pellauer, David (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984 and 1985)Google Scholar; and Vol. 3, translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988).

18 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 16.

19 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 3, p. 245.

20 Ibid. p. 246

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid.

23 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 4–16.

24 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 3, p. 246.

25 Ibid., p. 249.

26 Ibid. p. 248.

27 Ibid. p. 207.

28 Ibid.

29 Ibid. p. 248.

30 Ibid. p. 249.

31 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 27.

32 Ibid. p. 28.

33 Ibid. p. 30.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid. p. 28.

36 Ibid. p. 31.

37 Ibid. p. 32.

38 Ibid.

39 Ibid. p. 40.

40 Ibid. p. 33.

41 Ibid.

42 Ibid. pp. 34–35.

43 Ibid., p. 35.

44 Ibid., p. 36.

45 Ibid., p. 38.

46 Ibid.

47 Ibid., p. 39.

48 Ibid.

49 Ibid., p. 40.

50 Ibid., p. 43.

51 Ibid.

52 Ibid.

53 Ibid., p. 45.

54 Ibid., p. 46.

55 Ibid., p. 49.

56 Ibid., p. 51.

57 Ibid., p. 17.

58 Ibid., p. 52.

59 Ibid., pp. 52–55. Echoing Ricoeur's earlier work in Fallible Man, where the process of naming marks an epistemological convergence between the singularity of perception and the universality of language, the recourse here to institutionalized naming bears such remarkable features of similarity that we would be remiss in not making a connection between them. See also Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 120, n.5; p. 124, n.11. Elsewhere, Ricoeur writes, “I have never returned, at least not in this form, to the theme of disproportion and of fallibility. The sense of the frailty of all things human reappears frequently, however, in particular in my contributions to political philosophy in connection with a meditation on the sources of political evil. The actual return to the theme of fallible man would have to be sought instead in the last chapter of Oneself as Another, in which the theme of otherness (altérité)—one's own body, other people, conscience—takes the place of the threefold character of Fallible Man” (Ricoeur, Paul, “Intellectual Autobiography,” translated by Blarney, Kathleen, in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, Library of Living Philosophers, Vol. 22, edited by Lewis Edwin Hahn [Chicago: Open Court, 1995], pp. 15–16).Google Scholar

60 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 53.

61 Ibid., p. 54.

62 Ibid., p. 165.

63 Ibid., pp. 58, 94–96.

64 Ibid., p. 57.

65 Ibid., pp. 57, 95–96.

66 Ibid., p. 58.

67 Ibid., pp. 58, 95–96.

68 Ibid., p. 95.

69 See Ibid., pp. 32, 40, and 54. Ricoeur also offers a long and highly critical analysis of the debate within analytic philosophy concerning the domination of the network of intersignification by the pair of questions “what?” and “why?” Through the examination of the work of G. E. M. Anscombe and Donald Davidson, Ricoeur demonstrates how the analytical tradition has lost the question “who?” within a “logical gulf … between motive and cause,” and “action and event” (p. 63). Although further analysis of the concept of intention “erodes the clear-cut dichotomies of the preceding analysis” (p. 69), it has the unfortunate consequence of capturing the “what?” by the “why?” Ricoeur writes: “In this sense, the ‘why?’ controls the ‘what?’ and, in so doing, leads away from any interrogation concerning the ‘who?’” (p. 84). Further, the debate rests on an ontology of events which presents the person as “torn between event and substance without being relevant in itself” (p. 84).

70 Ibid., p. 58.

71 Ibid., p. 59.

72 Ibid., p. 95.

73 Ibid., p. 59.

74 Ibid., p. 95. This contrast between the “terminable investigation” of who is acting and the “interminable investigation” of the what and why of action is puzzling. To terminate the question of agency with the response, “the self,” implies a completion and/or closure of self that runs counter to Ricoeur's entire philosophical project (Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 3, pp. 207, 248–49). Therefore, the investigation of action can only terminate in a form of objective identification that is subject to the reidentification of the same, as in the case of legal identification of the one responsible for a crime (Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, pp. 99, 107).

75 Ibid., p. 95.

76 Ibid., pp. 92, 94.

77 Ibid., p. 95.

78 Ibid., pp. 93–94.

79 Ricoeur is quick to recognize that this move beyond “replies render[ing] someone in general a someone” to a self-designating agent, taken “as” representative of one of the analogous terms of ipse selfhood, is an aporetic process. In particular, he addresses three “difficulties”: (1) the possibility of attributing an action to an agent in relation to the descriptive suspension of the agent of action; (2) the prescriptive force of ascribing an action to an agent requires that an agent be held responsible for his or her actions, thus widening the gap between describing an action and imputing an action to an agent; and (3) action “depends on its agent … it is in the agent's power” to act, which opens the question of the causal dialectic of freedom and nature (Oneself as Another, pp. 96–112).

While these aporias are specific to the semantics of action, they repeat Ricoeur's familiar methodological problems: (1) the dialectic of suspicion and affirmation, and/or belonging and distantiation; (2) the hermeneutical dialectic of explanation and understanding where the world of the text constitutes an ethical laboratory for the exploration of possibilities for being-as; (3) the dialectic of freedom and nature described as the voluntary and involuntary, the infinite and the finite, perspective and transcendence, or the unity of identity and difference.

Each of these difficulties represents a perceived duality in Ricoeur's hermeneutics of selfhood. Universality of description is set in contrast to the specificity of self-designation, which, in turn, widens the gap between a self-designating subject responsible for his or her action and the general conditions for describing action through a semantic network of intersignification. However, the juxtaposition of a responsible subject who is the agent of his or her own actions, and a universal description of action which does not have the resources for self-designation puts the question “who?” not only in the context of agency, but qualifies the meaning of agency by an ethical and moral evaluation. Thus, developing the ontological explication of the agent's power to act is further qualified by a deliberative process which comes to light through the ethical and moral conditions for action. The answer to the question “who?” is then presumed by Ricoeur to move beyond the identifying reference of semantic description to identifying selfhood in terms of an ethieo-moral power to act. Hence, recourse to a pragmatics of language involves significantly more than Ricoeur assumes when he focuses on self-designation in situations of interlocution. Besides, such self-designation can always be considered and treated—also by the self-designating subject—semantically in the first place. Self-designation, according to Ricoeur, entails a concept of selfhood that is a power to act in such a manner that one remains self-constant. It is a free choice that is supposed to constitute selfhood; however, since his initial description of ipse identity is bound to that of the other, selfhood is a choice under the rule of morality guided by the ethical aim to live the “‘good life’ with and for others, in just institutions” (Oneself as Another, pp. 172, 180, 330).

80 Ibid., p. 113.

81 Ibid., p. 111.

82 Ibid.

83 Ibid., p. 113.

84 Ibid., p. 114.

85 Ibid., p. 113.

86 I have shown elsewhere that Ricoeur's understanding of narrative and ethical selfhood is also collapsed into a discourse of the sameness of identity. The conceptual pattern established by Ricoeur in his analysis of language and action is simply made “productive on another level of language” (ibid., p. 147), without making any fundamental change in the argumentive structure of these other levels of discourse. Although the voluntary act of ethical and moral selfconstancy (ipse identity), which makes a person available for another, is for Ricoeur the “most advanced stage of the growth of selfhood” (ibid., p. 171), ethical selfhood is still described from within a semantic network of intersignification. Ricoeur is once again attempting to identify the self as the “subject of action” by means of additional objectifications in which the self is supposed to reflect itself in and which takes place through “predicates such as ‘good’ and ‘obligatory’” (ibid., pp. 169, 187, n.22). Ricoeur writes: “The ethical and moral determinations of action will be treated here as predicates of a new kind, and their relation to the subject of action as a new mediation along the return path toward the self” (ibid., p. 169). This “new” level of analysis is not so much the description of selfhood without the support of sameness, as he claims in his analysis of the dialectic relation between self-sameness (idem identity) and self-constancy (ipse identity) at the heart of narrative identity, as much as it is a description of “moral identity … based … upon … narrative identity” (ibid., p. 295), which is, in turn, unfolded within Ricoeur's philosophy of action, or agency, explained by means of his understanding of the difference between semantics and pragmatics. For further development of this critique of Ricoeur's philosophy of selfhood, refer to my book Identifying Selfhood: Imagination, Narrative, and Hermeneutics in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur (New York: SUNY Press, 2000).Google Scholar

87 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 159.

88 Ricoeur, Paul, “Life in Quest of Narrative,” in On Paul Ricoeur. Narrative and Interpretation, edited by Wood, David (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 25.Google Scholar