PAUL RICOEUR

MICHELLE JOY Y. PANZO

 Paul Ricoeur was born in 1913 in Valence,
France. He studied philosophy first at the
University of Rennes and then at the Sorbonne.
From the earliest years of his academic life he
was convinced that there is a basic, irreducible
difference between persons and things. Unlike
things, persons can engage in free and
thoughtful action.
 Paul Ricoeur was among the most
impressive philosophers in the 20th
century.
Ricoeur's flagship in this endeavor
is his narrative theory.
 He was also a leading exponent of
hermeneutical philosophy. He developed a
theory of metaphor and discourse as well
as articulating a comprehensive vision of
the relation of time, history, and narrative.
 His is a reflective
philosophy which concerns
about
Ricoeur proposed a
hermeunetic idea of
 ….the self does not know itself
immediately, but only indirectly by the
detour of the cultural signs of all sorts which
are articulated on the symbolic mediations
which always already articulates actions,
and, among them, the narratives of
everyday life.
 means more than simply a
story. Narrative refers to the way that
humans experience time in terms of the way
we understand our future potentialities, as
well as the way we mentally organize our
sense of the past.
 More specifically, the past, for Ricoeur, demands
narrativisation. Humans tend to carry out
“emplotment” as we draw together disparate past
events into a meaningful whole, by establishing
causal and meaningful connections between them.
 Time and Narrative
Paul Ricoeur points out that we experience time
in two different ways. We experience time as
linear succession, we experience the passing
hours and days and the progression of our lives
from birth to death. This is cosmological time
expressed in the metaphor of the “river” of time.
 Time and Narrative
The other is phenomenological time.
This is the time experienced in terms of
the past, present and future.
 Time and Narrative
As self-aware embodied beings, we not
only experience time as linear succession
but we are also oriented to the succession
of time in terms of what has been, what is
and what will be.
 Time and Narrative
Ricoeur’s concept of “human time” is
expressive of a complex experience in
which phenomenological time and
cosmological time are integrated.
 The “narrative” constructs the
identity of the character, what
can be called his or her
narrative identity. In constructing
that of the story told. It is the
identity of the story that makes
the identity of the character.