ABSTRACT
When Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) died, readers familiar with his extensive body of work regarded him as one of the contemporary era’s most significant and wideranging thinkers. “We lose today more than a philosopher,” then-current French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin said in an official statement. “The entire European humanist tradition is mourning one of its most talented spokesmen.”1 Deeply conversant with the works of Kant and Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, Freud and Jaspers, among many others, Ricoeur influenced and transformed discussions ranging from phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and the social sciences to hermeneutics, moral philosophy, and Christian theology. What is sometimes acknowledged but not frequently addressed in the now-burgeoning scholarship on Ricoeur is the depth of his engagement with the writings of Søren Kierkegaard. On one hand, this is understandable. Viewed proportionally with respect to his entire authorship, Ricoeur’s explicit reflections on Kierkegaard’s writings might seem rather meager. On the other hand, a simple word count hardly passes for careful reading, and it is surely telling that when Ricoeur in specific essays does set Kierkegaard in express conversation with more obviously influential figures like Kant and Hegel, it is Kierkegaard who generally gets the last word. In a way (if the attribution of a “last word” is not too misleading in connection with a thinker for whom ongoing dialogue was so important), it is tempting to say that Ricoeur gave Kierkegaard the last word more generally. Perhaps this sounds hyperbolic, but by it I really only mean to indicate the notable appearance of Kierkegaard on the final page of the epilogue to Ricoeur’s last great work, Memory, History, Forgetting.2 Arguably, Ricoeur’s decision to conclude this magnum opus with a gesture towards Kierkegaard’s reflection on discourses about “the lilies in the field and the birds of
1 Reported in Ricoeur’s obituary in the University of Chicago Chronicle, vol. 24, no. 189, June 2005. Ricoeur held the John Nuveen Chair in Chicago’s Divinity School for 20 years, as well as having held posts in Strasbourg, at the Sorbonne, and as the Dean of the Faculty of Letters in Nanterre, just west of Paris. 2 Paul Ricoeur, La Mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, Paris: Seuil 2000. (English translation:
the air” attests to the depth of his engagement with Kierkegaard across a lifetime of reading. One task of this article will be to make the case that this might be so.
