Cogito wounded and political
25
Aug
Paul Ricoeur is one of the few current French philosophers (died in 2005)
who not only reads and translates from German and English, but also speaks to international currents of thought as diverse as German phenomenology (was translator of Ideas I of Husserl in 1950), to Gadamer’s hermeneutics or the English analytical philosophy and American.
Its flagship book, Soi-même comme un autre (national translation The oneself as another is bad), brought inscribed his beautiful title both on the issue of identity (Soi-même) as his invention of identity through otherness : comme un autre, emphasizing both the metaphorical dimension as well as ethics of this invention, metaphors are in his book: the living metaphor.
Opposing the “exaltation of the Cogito” in Cogito wounded a “broken” (brisé) or “injured” (blessé) as already wrote in the preface to himself as another.
This decline is both the seizure of a much larger unit, even if never totalizable the subject: a unit that is established in every action, in every work, such as the reintroduction of the subject and the world, surpassing the subjects and objects separation.
In politics the cogito injured, is the impossibility (if we are not able to see how Other (comme un autre), the result is a dialogue sometimes confrontational other times of silence, under an even greater suspicion.
Ricoeur distrusts the same tendency to a totalizing hubris and distrusted the Cartesian solipsism, he saw an uncritical application, that is, beyond its limits, the recent anticartesianos paradigms of which hybridity is the worst aspect.
Political dialogue is not hybridity, not composing speeches and exchanges of favors, in a sense, is discussion and clash in another discovery of shared values and thoughts.
