Paul Ricœur

Paul Ricœur (Valence, 1913 – Châtenay-Malabry, 2005) was a French philosopher best known for joining phenomenological description with hermeneutics, the theory and practice of interpretation. His thought belongs to the same tradition as that of other hermeneutic phenomenologists such as Husserl and Gadamer, and his work remains a reference for anyone curious about how the meaning of a text is made and recovered.

He was born into a devout Protestant family, a religious minority in Catholic France. His father died in the First World War when Paul was only two, and he grew up in Rennes with his aunt and grandparents. He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, where Gabriel Marcel shaped his early interests. Called up in 1939, he was captured during the German invasion of 1940 and spent five years as a prisoner of war. In the camp, classes and readings were organised with real rigour; there he read Karl Jaspers and began translating Husserl's Ideas.

After the war he taught at Strasbourg, and in 1950 he defended his doctorate with two theses: a minor one translating Husserl's Ideas I, and a major one on the voluntary and the involuntary. In 1956 he became professor of general philosophy at the Sorbonne, where he wrote Freud and Philosophy and The Symbolism of Evil. His years at the newly founded Nanterre campus, from 1965 to 1970, were overshadowed by the protests of May 1968. In 1970 he moved to the University of Chicago, where he wrote The Rule of Metaphor and the three-volume Time and Narrative.

His central idea is what he called a 'hermeneutics of distance'. A gap separates writer and reader, and that gap is what makes interpretation necessary. Once fixed in writing, a text loosens its ties to its author's intention and gains a life of its own. The reader meets the world the text opens up and must make it his or her own, applying its meaning to a personal existence. For Ricœur, interpreting means recovering meaning, not merely decoding words.

He also engaged with the so-called 'masters of suspicion': Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, who expose the illusions of immediate consciousness. Ricœur accepted their critique without giving up the search for meaning. In ethics he placed the question of the good life before that of moral norms, and defined the aim as living 'with and for others', using Aristotle's friendship as a bridge and turning to Levinas for encounters that are not friendly.

His influence reached anthropology and the social sciences, where Clifford Geertz and John B. Thompson drew on his work. He received the Balzan Prize in 1999 and the Kyoto Prize in 2000. He died in 2005 at his home in Châtenay-Malabry, near Paris.