The Demand of the Other in Paul Ricœur’s Philosophical Hermeneutics
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15633/lie.2122Keywords:
Ricœur, the demand of Other, ethics, vulnerabilityAbstract
The article proposes to view Paul Ricœur’s ethics and the demand of the Other from the perspectives that are mostly explicated in his seminal Oneself as Another, namely: the self and the suffering Other, friendship, the capable human being, and the notion of ‘the good life’ seen as the teleological horizon of a human life. My attempt is to demonstrate that for Ricœur the demand of the Other is set on the premise of understanding viewed as the fundamental mode of being‑in‑the world, and that his ethics of the Other comprises mainly such phenomena as mutual vulnerability, the self’s indebtedness to the Other and reliance on the Other, as well as an expression of the feelings of benevolence and solicitude. Significantly, for Ricouer the genuine response to the demand of the Other equals a worthy, fulfilled life manifested in the narrative coherence of a life. This article also touches upon the debate between Ricœur and Lévinas regarding the ‘I’ and ‘Thou’ relation and the underlying difference in their approach to alterity; Ricœur’s presupposition of the response of the Other and Levinas’s model which does not entangle reciprocity.References
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