Responsibility and the Physical Body

Abstract

Although Paul Ricoeur finds without doubt much inspiration in analytical philosophy for developing his own phenomenological hermeneutics, only recently have Ricoeur scholars begun paying considerable attention to his relation with Anglo-American philosophy. In fact, Ricoeur's discussion with analytical philosophy was the main topic of the Ricoeur centenary in Paris in 2013. In the introduction of a special issue of Ricoeur Studies, published in the wake of this conference, Johann Michel writes: While there has been a genuine enthusiasm for studies devoted to Ricœurian thought over the past twenty years or so, there is clearly a relative dearth of secondary literature on the significance that analytic philosophy holds for Ricœur's work (Michel 2014: 4). Indeed, in the wake of the Ricoeur centenary scholars have been examining the function of analytical philosophy in Ricoeur's thought, and how Ricoeur uses analytical philosophy for developing his own phenomenology and hermeneutics (Leclercq 2013, Petit 2014). In this article I examine Ricoeur's discussion of analytical philosophy of language in light of the concept of responsibility. aim of this examination is to demonstrate that responsibility is a key concept for understanding Ricoeur's relation with analytical philosophy, and his conception of the task of phenomenological hermeneutics in relation to cognitive science: to understand the motives of human action, rather than finding their causes.1This article consists of three sections. In the first section I examine Ricoeur's relation with analytical philosophy of language in general, as Ricoeur understands this relation in what is probably his main text on analytical philosophy: Le discours de Faction published in La semantique de ľaction (Ricoeur 1977). I argue that this relation is ambiguous. On the one hand, Ricoeur uses analytical philosophy of language for defining his own phenomenological hermeneutics. For Ricoeur, analytical philosophy of language helps to clarify the concepts of this hermeneutics in explaining how they relate to ordinary language that is publically accessible and thus to empirical reality: analytical philosophy of language withholds phenomenological hermeneutics from idealism, i.e., from being an analysis of experience based on only private intuition. On the other hand, hermeneutics supersedes analytical philosophy of language according to Ricoeur. For him, analytical philosophy of language insufficiently understands the experiences that correspond to our concepts in common language, and that give meaning to these concepts. In the second section I argue that Ricoeur's understanding of responsibility is exemplary for understanding his ambiguous relation with analytical philosophy of language. Therefore I discuss both his interpretation of semantics and of pragmatics in Oneself as Another and in his article The Concept of Responsibility, published in Just (Ricoeur 1992: 30-112; Ricoeur 2000: 11-35). According to Ricoeur, semantics and pragmatics explain how we use ordinary language to ascribe actions to agents and their physical bodies, and which we thus identify as causes (e.g., x is responsible for giving a speech). For Ricoeur, analytical philosophy of language explains in this sense responsibility as a causal relation identifiable in empirical reality by means of common language. In that sense, Ricoeur's discussion of analytical philosophy highlights his idea that phenomenological hermeneutics should be understood in relation to empirical reality: the domain of cognitive science. Yet semantics and pragmatics are also insufficient, for Ricoeur, for understanding the lived experience of being responsible, which allows comprehending the motivations for being responsible. Rather than examining lived existence, semantics and pragmatics stick to analyzing concepts in common language, and investigate how these concepts allow explaining the causes of actions and events. In the final section I investigate more exactly the extent to which Ricoeur's discussion of analytical philosophy of language, and his idea of responsibility, demonstrates the specific task of phenomenological hermeneutics in relation to cognitive science. …