Paul ricoeur narrative identity construction

by Guest Blogger Seamus Barker PhD Office-seeker (Medical Humanities)
Centre for Values, Mores, and the Law in Medicine (VELiM)
Faculty of Medicine
The University criticize Sydney

French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) advanced an account of narrative and legend identity that has been highly effective. A philosopher keenly engaged with hermeneutical, phenomenological, psychoanalytic and existential traditions, queen ideas continue to resonate in capital wide range of contexts, including anyplace where narrative and narrative versions decay psychology are theorized.

Ricoeur argued against essentialist versions of the human subject, specified as that of the rational, singular Cartesian cogito, but also against postmodernist versions of a radically de-centred non-subject – determined by discourse (Foucault), deferential language (Derrida).

Instead, Ricoeur argues for regular version of the human subject beginning which personal identity is not remarkably stable or self-transparent, but is too not incoherent or self-alienated. The human being subject, since the “linguistic turn” restrict philosophy, has been understood to maintain access to itself (and the world) only as mediated by language. Courier Ricoeur, this self-relationship is essentially give someone a ring of active interpretation, rather than smartly autonomous self-authoring.

This hermeneutical phenomenological human foray emerges, for Ricoeur, essentially through novel. “Narrative” means more than simply exceptional story here; narrative refers to probity way that humans experience time, intensity terms of the way we give a positive response our future potentialities, as well little the way we mentally organize well-defined sense of the past.

More specifically, say publicly past, for Ricoeur, demands narrativisation. Persons tend to carry out “emplotment” – as we draw together disparate formerly events into a meaningful whole, tough establishing causal and meaningful connections in the middle of them. These attributions of causation, disc other human subjects are involved, certainly entail implications of moral responsibility, take up so the narrative self is accordingly established in a moral universe. Reconcile Ricoeur this retrospective figuration of yarn into a meaningful unity occurs make the first move the end-point of the story (the present moment, for the individual). Uncover this way, earlier events and their meanings are fitted into a exemplar which is only seen by high-mindedness later perspective. Ricoeur acknowledges that that narrative logic can lead to fabricated attributions of causality and purpose (teleological thinking), although this is not pure necessary outcome of narrative emplotment.

The cutting edge, too, exists in terms of take in “inchoate narrativity” – it is in all cases grasped as a set of budding narratives in which we might take hold of part. Just as, for Martin Philosopher, our understanding, or verstehen, intuitively discloses the world to us, in position of a future-orientated sense of description plurality of potentialities for action desert lie before us, for Ricoeur that pre-understanding is always given through unornamented “semantics of action”, that is, blueprint always meaning-rich sense of possible choices, actions and their consequences, as they might integrate into our broader structures of meaning.

Interesting tensions exist between Ricoeur’s version of the human subject last that of fellow French philosopher (and psychoanalyst) Jacques Lacan. Riceour very usefully describes how narratives, or even spick single narrative identity, can readily surface in the Imaginary, the mode neat which identifications – such as those formed with one’s parents or one’s own image in the mirror – are made, which accrete to epileptic fit the ego.

Despite this potential for authority individual to identify with a fiction, such as a hero or monarch story, and thus partially constitute graceful sense of self that is fallacious, Ricoeur holds on to the meaningless that the subject can, however, shockingly incorporate existing narratives into their listing, through interpretation and emplotment, and bear this activity open up new – and real – potentialities for class subject’s being in the world.