Ideas from Oneself as Another
By Paul Ricœur
474 ideas
Sample Ideas
- Political practice must be analyzed through the distinction between 'power' (the shared capacity to act together) and 'domination' (hierarchical rule), and justice as isotes aims endlessly to subject domination to the power‑in‑common, a task that perhaps defines democracy.
- By subsuming teleological explanation by reasons under causal explanation, analytic theories have sealed the effacement of the subject in favor of relations between impersonal events; an epistemological analysis is therefore needed to re‑establish the legitimacy of teleological causality and to show its affinity with the phenomenological moment of intentionality.
- The self is worthy of esteem fundamentally because of its capacities rather than its accomplishments: extending Merleau‑Ponty’s 'I can' from the physical to the ethical level, Ricoeur characterizes the self as the being capable of evaluating its actions and judging itself to be good, where the emphasis falls on 'being‑able‑to‑do' and, ethically, 'being‑able‑to‑judge'.
- Ethical intention is defined as aiming at the 'good life' with and for others in just institutions, and this study’s task is to establish the primacy of this ethical aim over moral norms without lapsing into vague sentimentalism.
- Within Strawson’s framework that treats the person as a logical subject of predicates, the approach via identifying reference is powerful but keeps the question of the self hidden, because ascription to ‘ourselves’ is grammatically neutralized into an anonymous ‘one’ or ‘each one’, whose distributive force will only become explicit in a later theory of utterance.
- In the fourth subset, Ricoeur develops an ‘ethical detour’ in which the dialectic of self and other reaches its fullest articulation: the autonomy of the self is inseparable from solicitude for one’s neighbor and justice for each individual, and it is in the ethical and moral determinations of action that the richest dialectic of oneself and the other is disclosed.
- The first‑person 'I' is essentially ambiguous (Husserl’s 'necessarily ambiguous expression'): as a pronoun in the language system it is an empty, substitutable shifter (type) that any speaker can assume, yet in each concrete utterance it functions as an anchored token that designates a unique, non‑substitutable center of perspective, and this paradox can be partially clarified—though not dissolved—by Peirce’s distinction between type and token and by the notion of 'occasional' meaning.
- On the ethical and moral planes, the affection of the self by the other structures self‑esteem, friendship, justice, and obligation: friendship for oneself presupposes friendship with others; solicitude forms the 'bed of justice'; and the Golden Rule, together with the reversibility of agent and patient, installs reciprocity and equality at the heart of moral obligation.
- Despite Descartes’s intention to make the cogito the first and ultimate foundation, the order of reasons in the Meditations is effectively reversed in the Third Meditation: the demonstration of God’s existence subordinates the cogito to divine veracity, making God the ratio essendi and ultimately the ratio cognoscendi of the self and thereby undermining the cogito’s status as absolute first truth.
- Literary narratives offer models of intelligibility and interaction for life by clarifying the entanglement of different life stories through the competition of narrative programs.