Paul Ricoeur between Theology and Philosophy: Detour and Return

5 Refiguration: Ricoeur’s “Little Ethics”

5 Refiguration: Ricoeur’s “Little Ethics” Oneself as Another began with Ricoeur’s delivery of the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 1986, which explored the theme of the “capable person.” A person can speak, act, and narrate, which formed the bases for the first six studies. But a person can also make promises and decisions. These capabilities were not covered in the original lectures, but four years after these lectures, Ricoeur wrote a further three studies, which he ironically calls his “petite ethique, minima moralia,”1 for the publication of the book. It is this “little ethics” that constitutes Ricoeur’s major contribution to the field of ethics, and while it does fit into the overall argument of the book, it could also easily be published on its own. The first chapter has an Aristotelian focus, asking what is meant when one speaks of the “pursuit of the good life.” The second chapter takes a more Kantian approach, asking what it is to do one’s duty. The third chapter breaks out of the context of a teleological/deontological opposition, reclaiming Kant for Aristotle by way of Hegel, and forges the tools to resolve entirely novel ethical problems.2 The study on the ethical aim comes first because Ricoeur argues for “the primacy of ethics over morality—that is, of the aim over the norm.”3 The second study of the triad argues for the indispensability of a detour through moral norms as a necessary “sieve” through which ethics must pass. In the third, he reiterates that it is ethics to which morality must ultimately return when 106 | Detour confronted with limit cases. In this, Ricoeur again retraces on a micro-level the journey of his philosophy as a whole. The move here is from the ethical aim (conviction, understanding), through moral norms (critique, explanation ) and back to the deeper level of practical wisdom (second naïveté, appropriation ). Each chapter has a specific task to accomplish in the overall arc of the argument: (1) the primacy of ethics over morality, (2) the necessity for the ethical aim to pass through the sieve of the norm, and (3) the legitimacy of recourse by the norm to the aim whenever the norm leads to impasses in practice—impasses recalling at this new stage of our meditation the various aporetic situations which our reflection on selfhood has had to face.4 Ricoeur is keenly aware that his discussion of ethical aims and moral duty puts him in the middle of a longstanding conflict of approaches. He explicitly rejects any concern with “Aristotelian or Kantian orthodoxy,” although he takes freely from both, navigating by way of the now very familiar detourand -return pattern.5 The first building block of Ricoeur’s ethics is his working definition of the ethical intention: “aiming at the ‘good life’ with and for others, in just institutions.”6 He develops each of the three natural divisions in the definition in turn, and this sets the pattern for all three studies. The analysis in each study is distributed among the three grammatical persons (I/ self, thou/ other, he/she/each one), which makes for a three-by-three grid onto which we can map the little ethics. The Ethical Aim: Optative Self-Esteem In Ricoeur’s definition, the term “good life” is enclosed in scare quotes, implying that he is aware that there is something troubling about the term. What is troubling in this case is the difficulty encountered in filling it with any content. It remains as “the nebulous realm of ideals and dreams of achievements with regard to which a life is held to be more or less fulfilled or unfulfilled. Ricoeur argues the formal nature of the claim is not to be confused with a vague claim; this is avoided by the Aristotelian grounding of the good life in praxis. Praxis is measured in terms of “standards of excellence,”7 which are, as Ricoeur describes them, “rules of comparison applied to different accomplishments, in relation to ideals of perfection shared by a given Refiguration | 107 community of practitioners and internalized by the masters and virtuosi of the practice considered.”8 This is where the tools of the narrative arc come into play. In the production of the text that is a life, we interpret our actions through symbolic networks that precede us.9 It is within the context of a narrative identity...