Looking at the Sun: Chapter Summary

Ricoeur’s Reconsideration of Personalism

A New Perspective

by Dries Deweer

Ricoeur was considered a representative of the personalist movement in his younger years. Nevertheless, he later also supported the criticisms on personalism. The extent to which Ricoeur succeeded in integrating these two elements – loyalty and criticism – in his work shows us a way of regarding personalism as a tenable philosophical position and an important input in contemporary philosophy. In my chapter I analyze Ricoeur’s criticism of personalism, in order to show – against the dominant interpretation – how his work ultimately remains loyal to the personalist movement by developing a hermeneutical phenomenology of the human person that answers the problems of personalism in a way that respects its core ideas. These problems are:

(1) the neglect of the difference between interpersonal and institutional relations:

The personalist and communitarian ideal displayed the inclination to think of communities after the example of direct interpersonal relationships. Mounier and Maritain considered communities to be an extrapolation of friendship. Along the same line, Scheler presented his community ideal of the so-called Gesamtperson as kind of relationship of love. Ricoeur warned about the dangers of such an ideal of the small community. For, the distinction between politics and ethics is implicitly wiped out, while the distribution of power that is essential to politics is a matter of justice and not a matter of friendship or love. Besides, it also restricts the idea of a community to relations with persons with a face, persons with whom we can relate in a direct way. Hence, personalism curbs the enlargement of the idea of a community to institutional relations with any anonymous fellow human being, the enlargement to relationships where the other has no face, but nevertheless has rights.

(2) the lack of conceptual clarity:

Ricoeur observed that personalism, despite all good intentions, had never reached the same degree of conceptual clarity as the doctrines that it was supposed to match.

(3) the vulnerability to structuralist criticism:

Ricoeur found that personalism, by putting itself in the line with doctrines such as existentialism and Marxism, was exposed to the crushing criticism of structuralism. Structuralism characterized all of these doctrines as instances of humanism, in others words as doctrines that see the subject and its history at the source of meaning. This perspective was subverted by the structuralist focus on underlying systems where the meaning of social reality is produced by the differential relations within the totality of the system itself, independent of particular persons and the history that is determined by these systems. This new approach of philosophy seemed to make the subject and its history philosophically irrelevant, and with it all preceding philosophical currents that were founded on these elements, such as personalism.

(4) the dependence on a fixed Christian hierarchy of values:

The Nietzschean footing of contemporary philosophy implies a frontal attack on the Christian foundations of the concept of the person and the Christian value absolutism. With regard to this criticism, Ricoeur had especially Jacques Maritain and Max Scheler in mind, two personalist philosophers that explicitly characterized their personalism as a Christian philosophy. Although Ricoeur acknowledged that Mounier remained uncommitted in this regard, in order to allow both Christian and agnostic interpretations, he was convinced that this effort was in vain. One way or another personalism fell victim to the nihilist devaluation of all higher values.

I argue that Ricoeur eventually answers all four of these problems in his own reconsideration of personalism. The first problem finds an answer in Ricoeur’s distinction between the socius and the neighbor, which he later elaborated in the threefold structure of his so-called little ethics. The second problem was resolved in the dissociation of the concept of the person from the personalist doctrine, by means of the characterization of personhood as an attitude. The third problem was addressed by Ricoeur’s confrontation with structuralism as a necessary detour for a new understanding of the human person. Finally, Ricoeur took the edge off the fourth problem by presenting personal commitment as a matter of a risky conviction that makes the person commit himself to a transcendent cause that only receives a hierarchical value on the basis of the commitment itself.