A Passion for the Possible: Thinking with Paul Ricoeur

Introduction: How Much More Than the Possible?

Introduction How Much More Than the Possible? B R I A N T R E A N O R A N D H E N R Y I S A AC V E N E M A The death of Paul Ricoeur brings to a close the brilliant career of one of the best and most important philosophers of the twentieth century. His books and essays have informed and inspired untold numbers of scholars, teachers, and intellectuals around the world, and will continue to do so for generations to come. As Ricoeur wrote, however, in memory of Emmanuel Mounier, One of the cruelties of death is to alter profoundly the meaning of a literary work in progress. Not only does the work no longer involve a continuation since it is finished in every sense of the word, but it is also torn away from the dialogue of questions and answers which situated its author among the living. It will forever remain a written work and that is all. The break with its author is final; henceforth it enters into the only history which is possible for it—that of its readers and the men whom it will inspire. In a sense, a work attains the truth of its literary existence when its author is dead: every publication and every edition begins the inexorable relationship of living men with the book of a man who is virtually dead.1 The ‘‘canon’’ is now closed, and as David Pellauer tells us, ‘‘we are able to see how much of what came later was already implicit in, if not already signaled in, [Ricoeur’s] early work. . . . It is now possible, in other words, to trace lines of development in his thought because we know where they 1 end.’’2 In this sense the story is complete, Ricoeur’s life has ended; but his books and essays remain open to productive interpretations. Ricoeur has often been referred to as an occasional thinker for lack of any overall system that holds his thought together, and his oeuvre is complex and hard to assess without oversimplification. How does one remember sixty years of work, comprising thirty books and hundreds of articles?3 While Ricoeur has written overviews of his work,4 it remains a challenge for any reader to summarize his lifelong intellectual project. Since Ricoeur states, however, that ‘‘my life is my work, I mean, my books and my articles ,’’5 and in Time and Narrative, but more specifically in Oneself as Another , he argues that personal identity is best understood as a story, it seems reasonable to assume that Ricoeur’s work can be read as a story. Therefore, if we look at the path that Ricoeur’s work has taken, it is fair to say that his entire project narrates a ‘‘passion for the possible’’ expressed in the hope that ‘‘in spite of’’ death, closure, and sedimentation, life is opened by the how much more than possible of superabundance.6 This narrative of the more than possible is particularly evident in Ricoeur ’s philosophical anthropology and his religious thought. Readers of Ricoeur are well aware that he has tried to keep his religious and philosophical writings separate. In some of his most recent essays, however, these two lines of thought intersect in a remarkable way, allowing us, as Richard Kearney points out, to read Ricoeur’s work as ‘‘a medial position between ‘philosophical theology’ and ‘theological philosophy,’’’7 or as an ‘‘eschatology of ‘restored capacity’’’8 that liberates selfhood with the af- firmation that ‘‘you are better than your actions’’9 : grace is possible. Rooted in the development of Ricoeur’s philosophical anthropology, the passion for the more than possible can be understood as a forward movement of liberation and freedom, described by a phenomenology of human capacity, founded on an ontology of possibility, which gives way to a Grund/Abgrund, the groundless ground of human being, namely, God.10 Alternatively, we can say that there is a narrative unity to Ricoeur’s work that tells a story of the capable man, beginning with original goodness held captive by a ‘‘servile will,’’11 and ending with the possibility of liberation and regeneration of the heart. Such a story or configuration is of course an imaginary construction, a unity of themes pulled together in convenient manner for heuristic purposes. Nevertheless, the story of the capable man, set within a phenomenology of human capacity, is for Ricoeur ‘‘a philosophical anthropology on which...