paul ricoeur, solicitude, love, and the giftof his work in connection with religion that I will explore in this paper.
These are: intersubjectivity and recognition; responsibility, solicitude,
and justice; evil and regeneration, conscience and the gift.
Intersubjectivity and Recognition
Beginning with Oneself as Another, the notion of intersubjectivity be-
comes prominent in the work of Ricoeur. It is intimately involved
with the project of recognition. Ricoeur appeals first to a form of in-
terpersonal relationship which is influenced by Hegel’s understanding
of recognition, with its dialectical interaction — although for Ricoeur
there is no final Aufhebung. Such a dialogical movement is refined by
Ricoeur, however, by means of further exchanges with the work of
Husserl, Heidegger, and Levinas. As a result, recognition, in Ricoeur’s
adaptation, will embrace both solicitude for one’s friends and a pas-
sion for justice of those who are at a distance. Ultimately, Ricoeur
appreciates that it is this revised version of mutuality that can con-
structively inform a human being’s expansive relationship of respon-
sibility towards all human beings — both personally and, by extension,
collectively in the public realm of justice. Such an empathetic and even
liberatory interpretation of recognition helps to modify one of the
customary ways that recognition has been interpreted since Hegel’s
time. (This is the situation where the “other,” encountered in the
movement of negativity or differentiation, has tended to be subsumed
in the dialectic process.)
Kelly Oliver, in her book, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition, voices the
problematic aspects of this understanding of recognition, often
assumed as a battle leading to assimilation, if not supremacy. Oliver
has described “recognition as it is deployed in various contemporary
theoretical contexts” as “a symptom of the pathology of oppression,”
insofar as it “simply endorses the dominant culture’s superiority.”
Thus, “If recognition is conceived as being conferred on others by the
dominant group, then it merely repeats the dynamic hierarchies,
privilege and domination.”^13 Ricoeur’s own model of recognition,
- Kelly Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition, Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 2001, 9.