Paul Ricoeur between Theology and Philosophy: Detour and Return

7 Theological Anthropology: Removing Brackets

7 Theological Anthropology: Removing Brackets In chapter 5, we saw Ricoeur define the ethical aim as “the good life with and for others in just institutions,” but it remains to be seen what constitutes a good life. This definition is the main road of what is perhaps the most accessible example of Ricoeur’s critical arc, the move from the ethical aim through the detour of the moral norm and back to a lived practical wisdom. But the titles of Ricoeur’s three studies on ethics all begin with “The Self,” because his ethics as a whole is the return moment of a narrative arc that moved from description through narration to prescription. This self that is the holder of this ethical aim is constituted in narrative, and the narrativity of selfhood is crucial to making sense of any ethical aim. The constitutive narrating and re-narrating of a life story does not happen in a vacuum, but will draw on the narrative sources that are at the disposal of the teller. Moving further back through the arc to description, the pre-narrative components that are the raw material that is configured by emplotment, the actual lived events about which the story is told and retold, are not ethically neutral. Nor are the conceptual networks and symbolic structures that allow concepts such as “action” and “event” to be distinguished from sheer physical movement. While Ricoeur follows his mentor Marcel in allowing that “my life is not a story,” but he counters that “the story” he tells to himself and others “is the story of my life,” because “the demand for a story comes from the depths Theological Anthropology | 151 of life in order to clarify itself.”1 There is an “ontological priority” to the life that is told in the story, but there is an “epistemological priority” to the story itself. Our experience of the world is structured by language, and our experience of our own lived history is temporal and thus structured by narrative. In making the judgment of a good life, Ricoeur provides us with the tools to identify the narrative structure, but offers little when it comes to the content of the story that will be structured by narrative. His ethics presents us with the formal notion of a “good life” without telling us what constitutes such a life. To be sure, the good life must somehow be “with and for other in just institutions,” and there will be some reference to existing “standards of excellence,” but there is little in Ricoeur’s ethics that would enable us to judge a life “good” in the broadest sense. At best, we could offer the appraisal of “well done,” just as one could affirm that one had done well in one’s career without being able to judge whether the career choice itself was a good one. The thinness of Ricoeur’s account of the good life is a strength rather than a weakness, a humble admission that the “good life” cannot be defined with greater specificity without going further than philosophy can go. This could be read as a philosopher who is aware of and beholden to the call of Christ, but formally refuses to explicitly confess because it would violate the standards of the discipline. While Ricoeur’s ethics was the return movement of a hermeneutic arc that began with description and passed through narrative , the entire anthropological project was framed in terms of human capacities , and the prescriptive return can delve no deeper than the descriptive point of origin. For a comprehensive theological anthropology this is insufficient , but Ricoeur’s unwillingness to transgress the boundaries of philosophy is precisely what makes his philosophical hermeneutics so fruitful for theological reflection. Yet the judgment needs to be made, and here there need be no such constraints . We have the conceptual tools to define an explicitly Christian narrative identity, a good life with no phenomenological brackets surrounding it. We could, for example, begin to define the good life as that which glorifies the God who revealed himself in Christ, an explicitly theological statement. Ricoeur’s hermeneutic anthropology would then be called upon as a detour that helps us navigate the path from the confession of Christ as Lord to a life that is lived for Christ. This could in some sense appear arbitrary, for hermeneutics could as easily be deployed in interpreting how the words “Christ” and “Lord” are used, and how they have come to mean what they...