Key Arguments

• Ricoeur explicitly identifies 'the greatest lacuna in our earlier studies' as concerning 'the temporal dimension of the self as well as of action as such.'
• He observes that 'Neither the definition of the person from the perspective of identifying reference nor that of the agent in the framework of the semantics of action, considered nonetheless an enrichment of the first approach, has taken into account the fact that the person of whom we are speaking and the agent on whom the action depends have a history, arc their own history.'
• He adds that 'The approach to the self along the second line of the philosophy of language, that of utterance, has also failed to give rise to any particular reflection concerning the changes that affect a subject capable of designating itself in signifying the world.'
• He insists that 'What has been omitted in this way is not just one important dimension among others but an entire problematic, namely that of personal identity, which can be articulated only in the temporal dimen sion of human existence.'
• To address this, he proposes: 'In order to fill this major lacuna I propose to reconstruct here a theory of narrative, no longer considered from the per spective of its relation to the constitution of human time, as I did in Time and Narrative, but from that of its contribution to the constitution of the self.'

Source Quotes

In return, the question of the self, taking over the lead from that of action, gives rise to considerable rcshufflings on the plane of human action itself. Looking back, the greatest lacuna in our earlier studies most obviously concerns the temporal dimension of the self as well as of action as such. Neither the definition of the person from the perspective of identifying reference nor that of the agent in the framework of the semantics of action, considered nonetheless an enrichment of the first approach, has taken into account the fact that the person of whom we are speaking and the agent on whom the action depends have a history, arc their own history.

Looking back, the greatest lacuna in our earlier studies most obviously concerns the temporal dimension of the self as well as of action as such. Neither the definition of the person from the perspective of identifying reference nor that of the agent in the framework of the semantics of action, considered nonetheless an enrichment of the first approach, has taken into account the fact that the person of whom we are speaking and the agent on whom the action depends have a history, arc their own history. The approach to the self along the second line of the philosophy of language, that of utterance, has also failed to give rise to any particular reflection concerning the changes that affect a subject capable of designating itself in signifying the world.

Neither the definition of the person from the perspective of identifying reference nor that of the agent in the framework of the semantics of action, considered nonetheless an enrichment of the first approach, has taken into account the fact that the person of whom we are speaking and the agent on whom the action depends have a history, arc their own history. The approach to the self along the second line of the philosophy of language, that of utterance, has also failed to give rise to any particular reflection concerning the changes that affect a subject capable of designating itself in signifying the world. What has been omitted in this way is not just one important dimension among others but an entire problematic, namely that of personal identity, which can be articulated only in the temporal dimen sion of human existence.

The approach to the self along the second line of the philosophy of language, that of utterance, has also failed to give rise to any particular reflection concerning the changes that affect a subject capable of designating itself in signifying the world. What has been omitted in this way is not just one important dimension among others but an entire problematic, namely that of personal identity, which can be articulated only in the temporal dimen sion of human existence. In order to fill this major lacuna I propose to reconstruct here a theory of narrative, no longer considered from the per spective of its relation to the constitution of human time, as I did in Time and Narrative, but from that of its contribution to the constitution of the self The extremely lively contemporary debates on the question of narra tive identity in the field of Anglo-American philosophy seem to me to offer an excellent opportunity to confront head-on the distinction between sameness and selfhood, continually presupposed in the earlier studies but never treated thematically.

What has been omitted in this way is not just one important dimension among others but an entire problematic, namely that of personal identity, which can be articulated only in the temporal dimen sion of human existence. In order to fill this major lacuna I propose to reconstruct here a theory of narrative, no longer considered from the per spective of its relation to the constitution of human time, as I did in Time and Narrative, but from that of its contribution to the constitution of the self The extremely lively contemporary debates on the question of narra tive identity in the field of Anglo-American philosophy seem to me to offer an excellent opportunity to confront head-on the distinction between sameness and selfhood, continually presupposed in the earlier studies but never treated thematically. I hope to show that it is within the framework of narrative theory that the concrete dialectic of selfhood and sameness — and not simply the nominal distinction between the two terms employed up until now — attains its fullest development.1 Once the notion of narrative identity has been confronted with — and has, I believe, emerged victorious from — the puzzles and the paradoxes of personal identity, it will be possible to develop, in a less polemical and more constructive way, the thesis announced early on in the Introduction to this work, namely that narrative theory finds one of its major justifica tions in the role it plays as a middle ground between the descriptive view point on action, to which we have confined ourselves until now, and the prescriptive viewpoint which will prevail in the studies that follow.

Key Concepts

• Looking back, the greatest lacuna in our earlier studies most obviously concerns the temporal dimension of the self as well as of action as such.
• Neither the definition of the person from the perspective of identifying reference nor that of the agent in the framework of the semantics of action, considered nonetheless an enrichment of the first approach, has taken into account the fact that the person of whom we are speaking and the agent on whom the action depends have a history, arc their own history.
• The approach to the self along the second line of the philosophy of language, that of utterance, has also failed to give rise to any particular reflection concerning the changes that affect a subject capable of designating itself in signifying the world.
• What has been omitted in this way is not just one important dimension among others but an entire problematic, namely that of personal identity, which can be articulated only in the temporal dimen sion of human existence.
• In order to fill this major lacuna I propose to reconstruct here a theory of narrative, no longer considered from the per spective of its relation to the constitution of human time, as I did in Time and Narrative, but from that of its contribution to the constitution of the self

Context

Still at the beginning of the Fifth Study, Ricoeur diagnoses what is missing in the first four studies and announces a shift from linguistic analysis to narrative theory, now oriented not to 'human time' (as in Time and Narrative) but to the constitution of selfhood and personal identity.