Remembering Paul Ricoeur

2005

When I was young, I dreamed about becoming a knight. In retrospective, this seems nothing but a fantasy. But when I look at my six-year old son, I wonder if this almost forgotten dream really was just imagination. When he has his cardboard helmet on, looking for the monster under the stairs, he doesn’t imagine himself to be ‘Tuur, Knight of The Round Table’; he just is this fearsome warrior and protector of the poor and weak. The monster under the stairs is not just a shadow. As long as Tuur is a knight, the shadow is a monster (and the stairs are a deep, dark cave). As Ricoeur would say: “seeing as is being as.” It’s just one example of the power of human imagination. Human beings seem to be capable of building up their own world, with themselves as the centre of gravity that holds it all together. And we thank this capacity to our culture, with language as its vector. We live in the world we tell to ourselves about. We are what we tell ourselves, and each other, to be. Like the definition of a spider is its web, we are defined by the stories about ourselves. With Ricoeur’s elaboration on the relation between people and language as a guide, it will become apparent that talk about God has to find new ways to maintain its metaphorical strength, if it wants to be loyal to its referent.

1982

Dialogue, 1999

RésuméL'herméneutique de Paul Ricœur est centrée sur le problème de l'interprétation de soi par le moyen de la référence sémantique du monde du texte. Bien que Ricœeur poursuive un examen fort important du rapport entre le discours narratif et le processus de formation de l'identité, la façon dont il prolonge cette dynamique pour y inclure la question du sot est problématique. La distinction qu'il tente de tracer entre deux types d'identités, liés l'un à «ce qu'est» une personne (l'idem-identité) et l'autre à «qui» elle est (l'ipse-identité) enchevêtre inévitablement sa compréhension de la pragmatique du soi dans la sémantique de l'identité.

2007

Journal For the Study of Religions and Ideologies, 2010

Symposium, 2005

2017

An exploration of the formal logic of identity in the semiotic process of creation.