Category: Paul Ricœur

Paul Ricœur

I believe that we are henceforth incapable of returning to an order of moral life which would take the form of a simple submission to commandments or to an alien or supreme will, even if this will were represented as divine. We must accept as a positive good the critique of ethics and religion that has been undertaken by the school of suspicion. From it we have learned to understand that the commandment that gives death, not life, is a product and projection of our own weakness.

Paul Ricœur

With guilt there arises indeed a sort of demand which can be called scrupulosity and whose ambiguous character is extremely interesting. A scrupulous consciousness is a delicate consciousness, a precise consciousness, enamored of increasing perfection… This atomization of the law into a multitude of commandments entails an endless ‘juridization’ of action and a quasi-obsessional ritualization of daily life… With it we enter into the hell of guilt, such as St. Paul described it: the law itself becomes a source of sin.

Paul Ricœur

Guilt cannot, in fact, express itself, except in the indirect language of “captivity” and “infection,” inherited from the two prior stages. Thus both symbols are transposed “inward” to express a freedom that enslaves itself, affects itself, and infects itself by its own choice. Conversely, the symbolic and non-literal character of the captivity of sin and the infection of defilement becomes quite clear when these symbols are used to denote a dimension of freedom itself; then and only then do we know that they are symbols, when they reveal a situation that is centered in the relation of oneself to oneself. Why this recourse to the prior symbolism? Because the paradox of a captive free will – the paradox of a servile will – is insupportable for thought. That freedom must be delivered and that this deliverance is deliverance from self-enslavement cannot be said directly; yet it is the central theme of “salvation