morny joyacknowledge that: “The promise of a regeneration of power, of the
effective capacity to live the good life, of the reign of justice and peace,
this promise is of another nature. It belongs to the economy of the gift
that announces itself at the borders of philosophy, at once beyond its
limits and within its limits.”47 It is the gift that will henceforth feature
as a major element in Ricoeur’s later work and that will induce him to
explore previously uncharted terrain.
The Gift
The gift will begin to figure prominently in Ricoeur’s discussions on
religion and it is evident in his two final major works: Memory, History
and Forgetting (2004) and The Course of Recognition (2005). At this final
stage of his work, conscience is a gift which acts as a spur to change,
yet remains of inscrutable provenance. He is still vigilant, however, as
he does not wish any explicit religious references to intrude into a
philosophical discussion. Yet, he does now concede that there is
something of an overlap in the language that both religion and
philosophy use in connection with certain topics. He wonders if there
could be some kind of productive interchange resulting from this
shared language. He muses about this in an interview:
One of these [intersections] is probably compassion [solicitude]. I can
go rather far, from a philosophical point of view, in the idea of the
priority of the other, and I have sufficiently repeated that the ethical is
defined for me by the desire for the good life with and for others, and
by the desire for just institutions. Solicitude assumes that, counter to
all cultural pessimism, I pay credit to the sources of goodwill — what
the Anglo-Saxon philosophers of the eighteenth century always tried
to affirm in opposition to Hobbes, i.e., that man is not simply a wolf to
man, and that pity exists. It is true that these are very fragile feelings
and that it is one function of religion to take charge of them and
recodify them in a way.^48This reflection sets up the terms of reference by which Ricoeur will
begin to approach religious language, but still tentatively from behind
- Ricoeur, “Reply to Bourgeois,” in Hahn, Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, 570.
- Ricoeur in Azouvi and de Launay, Critique and Conviction, 159.