Paul Ricœur
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Today is the 109th anniversary of the birth of Jean Paul Gustave Ricœur (27 February 1913–20 May 2005), who was born on this date in 1913.
Ricœur was a prolific writer, including several works on the philosophy of history. One of these is his The Reality of the Historical Past, delivered as the Aquinas Lecture in 1984. For his lecture Ricœur chose an explicitly metaphysical theme — the reality of the historical past — which receives relatively little attention in the literature, especially as compared to epistemological themes. Taking this metaphysical approach to the philosophy of history, Ricœur criticizes Collingwood, who held that, “All history is the re-enactment of past thought in the historian’s own mind.”
Here is one paragraph out of several pages in criticism of the Collingwoodian thesis:
“The notion of re-enactment enters in on the level of historical thought, at the point where the historical construction, which is the work of the a priori imagination, makes its own truth claim. In this sense, it was necessary to extend the constructed character of the historical picture as far as possible in order to sharpen the paradox of re-enactment. Unlike the novelist, the historian has a double task: to construct a coherent picture, one that makes sense, and ‘to construct a picture of things as they really were and of events as they really happened.’ The second task is only partially accomplished if one considers the ‘rules of method’ that distinguish the work of the historian from that of the novelist: localizing all historical narratives in the same space and the same time, being able to relate all historical narratives to a single historical world, making the picture of the past agree with the documents in their known state or as historians discover them. If one were to stop at this, the problem of the past as such would not arise; for to localize events in the same space and in the same time not implying the notion of the present is also to leave aside the notion of the past. This is why, in the paragraph on the historical imagination, Collingwood frankly states that ‘as Descartes might have said… the idea of the past is an “innate” idea’.” (pp. 9–10)
Other major works in the philosophy of history by Ricœur include Memory, History, Forgetting and History and Truth. The first essay in the latter collection of papers is a discussion of objectivity, which might be consider an epistemological or a metaphysical theme, depending on how it is treated. Here, Ricœur references the work of French historian Marc Bloch, and seemingly takes a less realist tone than in The Reality of the Historical Past:
“We must be grateful to Marc Bloch for having used the term ‘observation’ to designate the historian’s approach to the past. By making use of an expression of Simiand, who called history a ‘knowledge through traces,’ Bloch shows that the historian’s apparent bondage of never being in the presence of his past object but only its trace by no means disqualifies history as science. Grasping the past in and through its documentary traces is an observation in the strong sense of the word — for to observe never means the mere recording of a brute fact. To reconstruct an event, or rather a series of events, or a situation, or an institution, on the basis of documents is to elaborate an objective behavior of a particular type which cannot be doubted. For this reconstruction presupposes that the document is interrogated and forced to speak; that the historian goes to meet its meaning by establishing a working hypothesis. Not only does the historian’s inquiry raise the trace to the dignity of a meaningful document, but it also raises the past itself to the dignity of an historical fact. The document was not a document before the historian came to ask it a question. Thus, on the basis of his observation, the historian establishes a document, so to speak, behind him, and in this way establishes historical facts. From this point of view, the historical fact is not fundamentally different from other scientific facts. In a similar comparison, G. Canguilhem maintains that ‘the scientific fact is what science makes in making itself.’ Objectivity is just that: a work of methodical activity. We may understand, then, why this activity bears the excellent name of ‘criticism’.”
A little known work by Ricœur (it took me some effort to obtain a copy) is his Zaharoff Lecture for 1978–1979, The Contribution of French Historiography to the Theory of History. Ricœur notes that French historical thought in his time shared the distrust of speculative philosophy of history also found in Anglo-American analytical philosophy (naming the dread triumvirate of Hegel, Spengler, and Toynbee as the scorned representatives of speculative philosophy of history), but he also noted that the arguments employed in rejection of speculative philosophy of history have been different on the continent as compared to across the Channel or across the ocean, being more rooted in historical practice than in philosophical considerations.
Near the end of this lecture, in his discussion of Paul Veyne, Ricœur makes an interesting observation about historical facts:
“Facts possess only relative individuality. This is why we say that scientific history is ‘at once explanatory and individualizing.’ The singular event, in the sense of what is nonrepeatable, is not the norm of historical knowledge but the exception. So, the historian is not interested in the marriage of the subjects of Louis XIV taken one by one, but in marriage in the peasant class under Louis XIV: this is the individuality of types with which history is concerned.” (p. 60)
Much could be made of this passage, especially in relation to the idea of history being ideographic rather than nomothetic (an idea from Windelband, Rickert, and Dilthey that I have often mentioned), though I have here torn it out of context from Ricœur’s discussion of Veyne’s conception of individuality and individualization. However, one might return to this with a proper regard for context and elaborate the idea from Veyne, as understood by Ricœur, and derive from it an interesting critique of the ideographical conception of historical knowledge (and, in Dilthey, more generally in the human sciences).
Because Ricœur’s corpus is so extensive, one cannot do justice to the interconnections between isolated remarks on the philosophy of history and the bulk of his output without making an effort to see his work whole, which I have not even attempted to do here. For example, Ricœur has written extensively on time and narrative, and it is likely that this work has important implications for philosophies of history that focus on the logic of narrative sentences, as in the work of Arthur Danto. It would probably require a specialist in the work of Ricœur to do justice to this particular relevance.
Further, it would be an interesting project to apply the ideas of Ricœur’s treatise Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary to history on a microscale — to apply these ideas, that is, to the actions of individuals as they make history, as we find in microhistory in the work of Charles Joyner and Carlo Ginzburg, inter alia — but, again, this would probably need to be the work of a specialist in Ricœur’s thought, as well as a specialist in microhistory. However, the Zaharoff Lecture is sufficiently focused on historiography and sufficient self-contained that it can be read independently of the bulk of Ricœur’s philosophy, and will be readily understood by someone with a background in philosophy of history.
Further Resources
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ric%C5%93ur
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ricoeur/
http://www.ricoeursociety.org/
https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Ric%C5%93ur%2C+Paul%22
