ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the critical relationship between narrative poiesis and ethical phronesis under three basic headings vision, initiative and empathy. In short, Ricoeur praises narrative understanding, where one represents oneself as another - to the extent that it serves to liberate us from narcissistic interests without liquidating our identity. In so doing, it generates a basic act of empathy whereby the self flows from itself toward the other in a free variation of imagination. Thinking poetically, acting poetically, dwelling poetically are all modalities of imagining poetically. Ricoeur acknowledges an ethical and political task for narrative imagination in ensuring that 'the tension between the horizon of expectation (future/utopia) and the space of experience be preserved without giving way to schism'. Here the narrative imagination takes on the role of a 'social imagination' in both its ideological function of legitimation and its Utopian function of subversion.
