From narrative to action: Paul Ricoeur's reflections on history

Abstract

This paper attempts to engage critically with Ricoeur's multifaceted and multilayered approach to history. Drawing on a vast number of philosophical, historical and sociological works, Ricoeur's hermeneutics develops as an invaluable corpus of writings on virtually all the aspects of history and historicity alike. This paper focuses primarily on Ricoeur's attempt to enrich further the interpretation of human historicity provided by the phenomenological-hermeneutic tradition and his consequent attempt to identify and indicate the liberating potential inherent in human action. Specific emphasis is placed in the role of body and of habitus in the very shaping of socio-historical worlds, while the place of birth (natality), death (finitude) and murder is also considered both in regard of their factual and ethical implications for human life. Correlative are the problems of self-identity, subjective and collective memory, subjective temporality and co-temporality, which are also in the centre of Ricoeur's meditations on history and thus of great importance for the purposes of the present work. At the same time, this paper touches on epistemological issues, as it examines the intricate ties that bind together understanding and explanation, structure and event, fiction and historical narrative, reality and imagination, history and truth. Finally, history is always addressed from the perspective of action as responsibility and utopian promise.

Keywords::

• Ricoeur
• authenticity
• hermeneutics
• historicity
• narrative
• phenomenology

Acknowledgements

This paper is a reworked version of a paper I presented in London on 14 March 2013 in the context of the Research Seminar in Philosophy of History, which runs under the auspices of the Institute of Historical Research. I am grateful to Dr Robert Burns and the seminar participants for their invaluable comments during that occasion, which I did my best to incorporate in this final version.

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Notes on contributors

Angelos Mouzakitis

Angelos Mouzakitis (MA, PhD University of Warwick, UK) was a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence, Italy (2003–2004). His research and teaching expertise lie in the fields of social theory and contemporary continental philosophy with specific emphasis on phenomenology and hermeneutics. Since 1999, he has been teaching at University level at various institutions in England, Italy, Austria and Greece, where he currently teaches social theory both at the University of Crete and at the Hellenic Open University. He is the author of Meaning, Historicity and the Social: A Critical Approach to the Works of Heidegger, Gadamer and Castoriadis (Dr Mueller Verlag, 2008) and has also published various articles in English and in Greek on Castoriadis, Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Levinas and systems theory.