Paul Ricoeur

French philosopher (1913–2005) of phenomenology and hermeneutics. In the wiki's corpus Ricoeur figures principally as: (a) the philosopher whose 1973 dictum "the philosophical basis of the major book of 1945 [Phenomenology of Perception] had for a long time been called into question" authorizes the ontological reading of MP's late work; (b) the Foreword-author and doctoral supervisor of Gary Brent Madison's *The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty* (1973 French / 1981 English self-translation), where Ricoeur frames the entire ontological-reading project; (c) the implicit dialogic partner whose own Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology (1967), Time and Narrative (1983-85), Soi-même comme un autre (1990), and many other works form a parallel hermeneutic-phenomenological tradition adjacent to MP's late ontology.

Key Points

  • The "Husserl-from-behind" hermeneutic: Ricoeur articulated (independently of MP) the principle that great works exceed their author's intentions and become available for future thinking — what MP would call the unthought thought (impensé). The principle is the methodological key for ontological readings of philosophical corpora. See unthought.
  • The reprise gloss: Ricoeur's Foreword to Madison 1981 names reprise (reappropriation) as the PhP-V&I relation — "neither developmental nor refutational." This term has become canonical in MP scholarship. See reprise.
  • The Schelling-MP question: in the Foreword (1981, p. xx) Ricoeur raises a question Madison's body does not develop — whether MP's late ontology should be related "to Schelling, who moreover is referred to, and to the philosophies of an absolute genesis of the finite... rather than to Heidegger and Husserl." This is the single statement in the Madison apparatus that foregrounds Schelling as MP's primary German Idealist kin. The wiki's current barbarian-principle / wild-being / Knight 2024 readings recover this Schelling-route reading; Madison's body does not. See madison-brute-being-genealogy-not-schelling-routed (candidate).
  • The Fink alternative: Ricoeur's foreword closing also raises Fink's 1934 Kant-Studien paper on the origin of the world as alternative to Schelling for the unthought thought of phenomenology. The Husserl-Fink-MP genealogical line is opened by Ricoeur but not developed by Madison.
  • The painting trajectory as model: Ricoeur's foreword identifies the three painting essays (Cézanne's Doubt 1945 → Indirect Language 1952 → Eye and Mind 1960) as "the very model for all the other transformations" in MP's intellectual development. This framing organizes Madison's Ch II and remains a standard structuring of MP-on-painting.
  • The three terminological shifts: Ricoeur identifies perception → vision; body → flesh; Being capitalized as the three terminological shifts that mark MP's "philosophical reversal" between PhP and V&I.
  • Christian-philosophical reading of late MP: Ricoeur foreword (p. xx) reads MP's late philosophy as "sharpened by Merleau-Ponty's meditation on Christianity, Pascal, and Malebranche... perhaps the heart of the late philosophy." Madison takes up Pascal-Malebranche in Ch V §III; the deus absconditus reading of MP's "hidden god" (VI, 211; VI, 264) descends from this Ricoeur-foregrounded line.

Distinctive Theses (relevant to the wiki)

  • The unfinished work has one side: at MP's death, the work "no longer lives except outside of itself, in us, its readers" (Madison Introduction, l. 497, gloss on Ricoeur). The hermeneutic task is to "make all the writings spread out over the course of the author's history belong to a single development effected through many changes of direction."
  • The ontological reading is methodologically justified because MP himself adopted it for Husserl. The legitimacy of reading PhP "under the critical gaze of the unfinished work" rests on MP's Signs essay "The Philosopher and His Shadow" (1959).
  • The "bad ambiguity" diagnosis is MP's own admission, not a critic's verdict. Ricoeur's foreword: "Gary Madison can indeed speak in Merleau-Ponty's own voice when he characterizes as 'bad' the ambiguity attributed to this philosophy" (foreword p. xv).

Sources

Connections

  • teacher and Foreword-author for gary-brent-madison — supervised Madison's 1973 Sorbonne dissertation and authored the Foreword to its 1981 English edition.
  • parallel hermeneutic interlocutor of Merleau-Ponty — Ricoeur's La symbolique du mal (1960), De l'interprétation (1965), and later hermeneutic works develop a phenomenology of interpretation parallel to MP's late ontology of expression.
  • names the reprise relation between PhP and V&I — the methodological key for ontological readings.
  • opens the Schelling-MP question — though Madison's body does not develop it; the wiki's current barbarian-principle reading (via Knight 2024 / Saint Aubert 2021) recovers this line.
  • suggests the Fink alternative — Husserl's unthought thought as the origin-of-the-world question.
  • reads MP through Pascal and Malebranche — the Christian-philosophical genealogy of MP's "hidden god."

Open Questions

  • Ricoeur's own work (especially Soi-même comme un autre 1990, La mémoire, l'histoire, l'oubli 2000) is not yet ingested into the wiki. His relation to MP via the Foreword is well-documented; his relation to MP via his own writings is under-tracked.
  • Ricoeur's reading of Husserl as a Stiftung-thinker (Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology 1967) is structurally adjacent to MP's reading; the relation could be developed if Ricoeur's Husserl-work is ingested.
  • Ricoeur's hermeneutics-of-suspicion (Freud-Marx-Nietzsche) and MP's negative-philosophy-as-ontological-psychoanalysis (Ch IV §II.2) are structurally similar but never explicitly connected in either oeuvre.