Abstract
Ricoeur interpreted the work of compromise as a creative process to imagine a new world by projecting ourselves into other people. The challenge of compromise is to learn to tell our own story differently within the contours of a broader collective narrative, in compliance with the paradigm of translation. As such, Ricoeur’s political ethics of compromise is at risk of highlighting the element of creation, which refers to the social imagination of a shared vision of a better society, at the cost of recognition of the element of renunciation, which refers to the reciprocal shelving of ideas and desires that the other side considers to be truly intolerable. However, I argue that we can read a delicate connection between forgetting, forgoing and forgiving in Ricoeur’s thought. It is, then, the model of forgiveness, as part of the paradigm of translation, that gives due respect to the importance of renunciation through the emphasis on the unjustifiable, for which renunciation even cannot suffice. The ‘poetics of pardon’ brings creation and renunciation together and, by doing so, it highlights that compromise always remains an object of hope.
Given the polarized nature of contemporary politics, it is hardly surprising that the concept of compromise has become a central concern in political ethics. Over the last decade, many philosophers have sought to clarify the nature and the value of compromise. 1 Neither is it surprising to see that Paul Ricoeur surfaces as an interesting interlocutor in this debate. 2 Throughout his philosophy, he constantly rose to the challenge of recognizing real tensions while remaining able to look beyond the tensions. This compromising philosophical attitude was also reflected in his political ethics. In this article, I will explore Ricoeur’s understanding of compromise as the core of political responsibility and I will argue that Ricoeur’s late reflections on memory and forgetting contain a linchpin to his political ethics of compromise. First, I will explain the place and role of compromise in Ricoeur’s political philosophy. Then I will indicate how he thinks we should put our political responsibility for compromise into practice. Next, analysis of the above uncovers a clear emphasis on creative imagination in Ricoeur’s understanding of compromise, which in turn shifts my attention to the role of renunciation, in danger of being overlooked.
Paradox and compromise
Paul Ricoeur’s political philosophy is centred on the idea of the so-called ‘political paradox’. This paradox expresses the fragility of political action as both necessary support and constant threat to the good life. 3 Throughout the years, he developed three distinct versions of this paradox. 4
The first meaning of the political paradox is the tension between form and force in politics. Form refers to the fact that political power establishes a rational order, in particular by means of a constitution that guarantees rights and duties and checks and balances. Force refers to the fact that the establishment and the continuation of power is always tainted by original and residual violence. The implication of this paradox is that we have a responsibility to safeguard a fragile equilibrium in which the use of force remains subservient to a humane and rational form. 5
The second meaning of the political paradox places the political at the intersection of a horizontal and a vertical relationship. In Oneself as Another (1992), Ricoeur reflected on the nature of institutional relations. After Hannah Arendt, he argued that institutional relations do not primarily constitute a coercive normative framework, but rather a shared ethical pursuit that is expressed in the ability to act in concert. 6 The political community is primarily dependent on this horizontal bond, that is, the will to live together, but it always contains a vertical relationship as well, that is, a relationship of rulers and subjects. This paradoxical mixture makes politics fragile, because the horizontal relationship is always in danger of being forgotten behind the prominence of the vertical relationship. 7
The third and final meaning of the political paradox appears against the background of the plurality of spheres of justice (after Walzer) 8 or systems of justification (after Boltanski and Thévenot). 9 Ricoeur emphasized the particularity of the political in comparison to other spheres (such as the market, the family, the religious, etc.). He exposed a tension between the political as a part and as the whole, as ‘inclusive instance’ and as ‘enclosed region’: On the one hand, the political is one sphere among others, on the other hand, it is the sovereign sphere that encompasses all other spheres to the extent that it is responsible for protecting the borders between spheres. 10 In that regard, Ricoeur emphasized the context of neoliberalism, where weakened political institutions have to hold back the invasion of the market into other societal spheres. 11 The political fragility in the first two paradoxes mainly emerged as the risk of the state overstepping its boundaries. This third paradox, however, emphasizes the opposite risk of a state that remains too modest, as just another sphere next to other spheres. 12
Ricoeur’s reflections on the paradoxical nature of politics have important implications concerning civic responsibility. 13 Vigilant and active citizenship is necessary for the survival of the fragile equilibria between the poles of the paradox. 14 Ricoeur argued that, in the end, the necessary equilibria depend on formulating the common good. Firstly, it is the prudential formulation of the common good that indicates and confirms the form that needs to limit the force. 15 Secondly, it is through the common good that the horizontal dimension of the will to live together becomes concrete, in its unification of the plurality of outlooks present in society. 16 Thirdly, politics can only fulfil its function as englobing sphere if the different spheres are assigned a distinct place in an overarching conception of the good, for it is only an overarching project that provides a clear delineation between spheres. 17
However, within the context of contemporary societies and their inner diversity, the common good is far from obvious. According to Ricoeur, we have to accept that the common good is no longer a given, but we should not therefore be tempted to reduce the common good to a collision of individual interests. The fact that the common good is not given does not mean that the idea of a common good is redundant in contemporary politics. It can no longer be the point of departure, but it forms all the more a horizon, that towards which we proceed step by step, without ever really arriving. This is what brings compromise to the centre of Ricoeur’s political ethics, for it is only through compromise that we can little by little give content to a shared and supported vision of a better society. In that sense, it is compromise itself that is the necessary condition for an adequate compromise between the poles of the political paradox. Democratic ethics, hence, emerged as a particular ethics of argumentation. 18 More precisely, it is an ethics of compromise because the core of this ethics is the pursuit of compromises as the only way forward in the direction of the common good: ‘Compromise is always weak and revocable, but it is the only way to reach for the common good. We cannot reach the common good unless by means of compromise, between strong but competing claims’. 19
To be clear, Ricoeur did not deny that conflict characterizes plural democracy. He emphasized that compromise is different from consensus, in which all difficulties are ironed out. Reaching compromise is an uphill process that depends on the recognition that no one has a complete monopoly on truth and that we therefore all benefit from listening to each other and trying to understand each other. 20 Hence, the formation of compromise does not require denial of one’s own convictions. It rather depends on a creative approach, able to integrate those convictions into a broader perspective: ‘A compromise is honest if it recognizes the force of the claims of all sides, but at the same time it is creative, because it clears the road towards the search for new and broader principles’. 21 It is exactly this creativity that was central to Ricoeur’s reflection on practical wisdom in Oneself as Another, where he talked about a dialogical process that stands midway between contextualism and universalism, a dialogical process that does not degrade convictions, but rather upgrades them to well-considered convictions. 22
Mutual recognition
Ricoeur provided the most developed reflection on compromise in dialogue with the work of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot. 23 In De la justification (1991), these French sociologists describe the irreducible plurality of strategies of justification that are used to evaluate people and actions within different social domains (cités) or ‘economies of worth’ (ordres de la grandeur). 24 They distinguish the logic of justification in the civic world, the market world, the industrial world, the domestic world, the world of inspiration and the world of fame. Boltanski and Thévenot focused on the need for compromises in case of disputes in which ultimate principles of justification coming from these different worlds collide, while these compromises are basically impossible, because, in the words of Christian Thuderoz, there is no distinct ‘world of compromise’, there is only ad hoc bricolage of the existing worlds. 25 In other words, there is no higher order principle to which we can refer to settle the conflict between principles from different worlds. We can only acknowledge that we always and simultaneously take part in different worlds and somehow deal with that.
Ricoeur approached the issue through the lens of mutual recognition. 26 The conflicting outcomes of different strategies of justification can lead to feelings of being wronged, to feelings of indignation, and eventually to the contestation, not just of a particular reasoning, but of the very contribution of rival ‘economies of worth’ to the common good. In that sense, Ricoeur preferred the term ‘dispute’ over contestation, as a way to emphasize the lack of a shared standard of reference. It is this lack of common ground that emphasizes the importance of our human capacity to compromise. In light of such disputes, compromise is according to Ricoeur what constitutes mutual recognition. Therefore, Ricoeur takes an ethical approach to Boltanski and Thévenot’s conception of compromise. Compromise reveals our capacity to become attentive to – and, eventually, to understand – values that belong to a different world and the intersections between different worlds as necessary precondition for mutual recognition of being a legitimate participant in the discursive construction of the common good. 27
Ricoeur’s political ethics of compromise is to be understood in light of his philosophical anthropology. 28 The capacity to compromise is dependent on a subject that is able to welcome the other without self-loss. That is an essential part of what is at stake in Ricoeur’s philosophical anthropology of Oneself as Another (1992): the mutual recognition of oneself in the other and of the other in oneself. The other is, then, not only a threat to the self. Recognizing the other is, eventually, a precondition for self-recognition. The direct self-consciousness of the Cartesian cogito had collapsed, but Ricoeur’s hermeneutic-phenomenological project was based on the hypothesis of an indirect reconquering of the cogito and the continuation of modernity’s philosophical project. The broken cogito is not a dead end, it is the starting point of an endless search for mediated self-attestation. Therefore, throughout his reflections on the speaking, acting, narrating and responsible self, Ricoeur continuously uncovered the need to recognize the other in order to come to an attestation of the self. That is what allowed Ricoeur to distinguish true compromise (compromis) from being compromised (compromission) 29 : Compromise is not the negation of one’s identity or the corruption of economies of worth, it is the negation of exclusivity that enables the creative imagination of a world with a ‘multiple foundation’ where we can live together in fragile but real circumstances of mutual recognition. 30
The emphasis on fragility is important here. The political dialogue in which the common good must take form is strongly marked by political rhetoric, with all that this entails:
This rhetorical fragility does not condemn political language. Rather, it entrusts it to our care and protection and it obliges us to ensure that it functions as good as possible, given the proper level of argumentation – namely again the rhetorical level, which places it in the vulnerable zone between rigorous proof and fallacious manipulation.
31
Therefore, Ricoeur’s political ethics steered clear of excessive pretence. It is about the pursuit of a common good that remains elusive and can only be approached in partial and fragile compromises, which forces us to continue looking further: ‘to think more and to speak differently’. 32 Ricoeur’s political ethics, hence, appears in the optative mood. His conception of political responsibility is eventually characterized by hope, as a synthesis of patience, courage and confidence. 33
The latter is not to deny the place of violence, or the importance of indignation that ensues from violence, in the political. To the contrary, the political paradox keeps running like a thread throughout Ricoeur’s political thought. His ‘little ethics’, in the seventh until ninth study of Oneself as Another, contained a thorough confrontation with the depth of normative conflict. The seventh study introduces the ethical aim of living ‘the “good life” with and for others in just institutions’. 34 In the eighth study, he emphasized ‘the necessity for the ethical aim to pass through the sieve of the norm’. 35 Ricoeur used the concept of morality to distinguish this normative dimension from the ethical aim. Leaning on Kant, he emphasized that the finiteness of the will necessitates boundaries that constrain our action. ‘Because there is evil, the aim of the “good life” has to be submitted to the test of moral obligation’. 36 Morality is, in other words, a necessary answer to violence. Whenever power-over threatens the power-to-do, moral obligation and the indignation attached to it are inexpungible. 37 However, conflict runs even deeper, as Ricoeur explained in the ninth study. There, he confronted the tragic wisdom about the inevitable conflicts in moral life itself. Tragedy teaches us that life is often too complex for the one-sidedness of moral principles. 38 Applied to the political sphere, this insight reintroduced the political paradox. Ricoeur distinguished three ‘levels of radicality’ in the conflicts that permeate the political. 39 The first level of eternal political conflict concerns the prioritization among primary social goods. The second level concerns the goals of good government, or, in other words, the meaning of the big concepts that are embodied in the constitution of a political community, such as liberty, equality and security. Both the meaning of any one of these concepts in itself and their relationship to each other remain undecidable. The final and most radical level concerns the ‘fundamental indeterminacy’ of the basis of power and, therefore, of the legitimacy of democracy. 40 Ricoeur argued that we cannot deal with these eternal conflicts in a non-arbitrary way without deliberative recourse to the ethical intention. This ‘art of conversation’ 41 characterizes the fragile practical wisdom in the political insofar as we remain fully aware of the ineradicability of human suffering. In that regard, the idea of eliminating violence and conflict is for Ricoeur nothing less than dangerous nonsense. 42 The link between Ricoeur’s political ethics and his philosophical anthropology is therefore not to be interpreted as a suggestion that human beings are spontaneously wired towards compromise-seeking behaviour. It is merely an attestation of the fact that it is within our human capabilities to seek compromise, despite everything that points to the contrary.
The paradigm of translation
The question remains of how we are supposed to put our political responsibility for compromise into practice. Ricoeur referred to translation as the paradigm that should guide our path 43 :
A new dimension of personhood is thereby revealed, that of understanding a world other than one’s own, a capacity we can compare to that of learning a foreign language to the point of being able to appreciate one’s own language as one among many. If translation can itself be interpreted as a way of making what is incomparable comparable […], it is then the capacity for compromise that opens a privileged access to the common good.
44
Ricoeur emphasized that the task of translation is twofold. The translator has to restate something that was stated elsewhere, in a different linguistic and cultural context, drawing on the resources of his own linguistic and cultural context. This implies that she has to find a place in her own language for elements of another language, hence creating an opening in her own language to be able to phrase things in a different way. 45 Ricoeur talked about this as ‘the spirit of translation, consisting in transporting oneself into the sphere of meaning of the foreign language and in welcoming the other’s discourse into the sphere of the target language’. 46 The fact that translation can serve as a model for the pursuit of the common good comes from the ethical dimension of translation:
It seems to me that translation poses not just an intellectual, theoretical, or practical labor but also an ethical problem. To bring the reader to the author and the author to the reader, at the risk of serving two masters, is to practice what I would like to call ‘linguistic hospitality’.
47
Linguistic hospitality highlights the ethical dimension of the desire to translate. It refers to the aspiration of bringing together oneself and the other with the risk of betraying both. It refers to overcoming one’s fear of the unknown and the feeling of one’s identity being threatened. It also refers to recognizing the impossibility of performing a perfect translation. The ethics involved is a distinct dimension of justice. It is the realization of the equivalence between the familiar and the strange, without reducing the one to the other: ‘equivalence without identity’. 48 Ricoeur raised this ethical model of translation to the status of a paradigm for all rapprochement between people.
In the same way that linguistic plurality models human plurality in general, the overcoming of the difficulties of plurality in translation models every endeavour to reach compromise:
Translation is from end to end the remedy for plurality in a world of dispersion and confusion. […] This struggle with plurality, its failures and successes, continues in spheres more and more distant from that of work properly speaking applied to language and languages. Translation functions as a paradigm by which to expand the problematic. Humanity, I said, only exists as fragmented. In this regard, historical communities, with their dominant ethnic, cultural, juridical, political and religious features, can be compared to heterogeneous linguistic conglomerations concerned to protect their identity when confronted by such diversity.
49
What this paradigm suggests is that different identities and outlooks should be considered collections of meanings, with internal links and concepts that can be transposed in the same way that a language can be transposed into another language, with all of the same possibilities and limitations. This means that we also have to search for equivalence without identity and that we have to recognize the fact that there is no overarching perspective that illuminates these relations once and for all. It is a step-by-step – ‘de proche en proche’ – process in which an understanding of another’s view and an enrichment of one’s own view is achieved. Just as we assume that no language is untranslatable a priori, we can also assume that no economy of worth or outlook on life is radically alien. Through hard work, we can come closer and closer to one another and enlarge the circle of recognition. 50
At this point, it is important to keep in mind the extension of what Ricoeur was trying to say. The discussion of linguistic hospitality does not replace or warp the recognition of conflict and the oppressive dimension of politics. The other remains as offensive as ever. There is no less cause for indignation. Ricoeur did not assume the other to be spontaneously willing to seek compromise with me, nor did he assume the self to be willing to welcome others without further ado. His discussion of the utter complexity of normative conflicts in Oneself as Another remains the necessary background to make sense of what he later on wrote about the ethics of linguistic hospitality. 51 The phenomenology of translation is, therefore, not an all-encompassing key to understand human interaction. Ricoeur’s aim is merely the attestation of a valuable clue to move forward and to remain hopeful. The paradigm of translation is definitely not the only paradigm that guides political action. One might even say that it is unlikely to prevail. However, a thorough understanding of what happens in translation shows us that the pursuit of compromise is not necessarily an impossible undertaking.
An example of how this paradigm of translation works in practice is provided in Ricoeur’s reflections on European integration. He elaborated this in three steps, each with an increasing degree of significance. The first step pertains strictly to the sphere of translation itself. On a practical level, linguistic hospitality is expressed in the task of learning foreign languages and participating in the activity of translation. Eventually, the hospitality will not so much concern the language itself, but the foreign culture that expresses itself by means of the language in question. Hence, translators have an important role to play in the transfer of meaning, ranging from the meaning of customs and beliefs to that of social principles. Being sensitive towards another language makes it easier to be sensitive towards other cultures and other ways of thinking and acting. In this way, linguistic hospitality fosters the ethical impulse for more sympathetic political interaction between persons and for political integration. 52
The second step follows from the preceding step. What is exchanged by means of translation is, to a large extent, a matter of distinct memories that are linked to a community’s identity. Hence, the second step concerns the exchange of memories. Given Ricoeur’s narrative conception of identity, different identities come to the fore in different stories. 53 These stories can always be revised. Moreover, the stories that compose a community’s identity are always linked to the stories of others. This brings a different dimension of hospitality to the surface:
What we are supposed to break here is the principle of closure that always threatens to contaminate what I have called narrative identity. It is important to always remember that we are entangled in the story of others, in multiple stories, told by others about themselves and by others about us. That is where the task of exchanging memories has its origins. This task consists in assuming the history of others in imagination and in sympathy through the life stories that concern them. This demand goes a long way, it asks us to learn to tell our own story differently through the stories that others tell about us.
54
The third step of the integration process again follows from the preceding. The shared recollection of memories is usually painful. In this process, we inevitably encounter, what Ricoeur described as, ‘the broken promises of history’. This points to the fact that throughout history, every community has confronted suffering, both in the sense that its members have endured suffering and in the sense that they have caused suffering to others. The aim of narrative hospitality in this respect is to start from the suffering of others. At this point, the exchange of memories shifts into the domain of forgiving. Ricoeur referred to historical examples, such as the prostration of German chancellor Willy Brandt in Auschwitz or the speech of Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat before the Knesset, to explain a certain ‘poetic power’:
Its ‘poetic’ power consists in shattering the law of the irreversibility of time by changing the past, not as a record of all that has happened but in terms of its meaning for us today. It does this by lifting the burden of guilt which paralyses the relations between individuals who are acting out and suffering their own history. It does not abolish the debt insofar as we are and remain the inheritors of the past, but it lifts the pain of the debt.
55
This model of forgiveness emphasizes the depth of the imaginative power that is necessary to forge compromise, as we will come to understand after further analysis of the logic in Ricoeur’s political ethics of compromise.
Creation and renunciation
The key feature of Ricoeur’s understanding of the political ethics of compromise repeatedly surfaces here. Compromise is not to be found, it is to be created. Compromise is dependent on our imagination to project ourselves into other people and other roles and to think of a better society. Our imagination is what enables us to navigate between disagreements towards the fragile and ever-revocable compromises on the common good. 56 Therefore, the phronesis at the heart of Ricoeur’s political ethics can be considered ‘poetic wisdom’. 57
The roots of this idea of poetic wisdom date back to Ricoeur’s doctoral research on the phenomenology of the will. In the introduction to Freedom and Nature, he announced a third volume, after the phenomenology of the voluntary and the involuntary in the first volume and the hermeneutical turn to understand evil in the second volume: ‘In addition, the completion of the ontology of the subject demands a new change of subject, moving on to a kind of “Poetics” of the will, suitable to the new realities that need to be discovered’. 58 The ‘poetics of the will’ expressed the hope of creative reconciliation of the tensions – between freedom and nature, infinity and finitude – at the heart of human personhood. This third volume never got written as such, but it can rightfully be claimed that it is omnipresent in all of Ricoeur’s later work. 59 His philosophical anthropology of the human person as a capable and fallible being continuously emphasized the ‘impossible possibility’ of reinventing oneself in light of the paradoxical tension between passivity and agency. The tragic tensions in life force us to continuously write and rewrite our own narrative identity, which is never independent but neither fully determined by the narrative in which we always already find ourselves.
The poetic horizon of an inclusive narrative of who we are as a person emerges at the level of society as well. The encounter with the other complicates the tensions. It is, then, not only a matter of impossible self-understanding but also a matter of infinite responsibility to the other. In light of this tension, we are not only to imagine new ways to understand ourselves but also to act with and for others. That is the challenge of the common good, the imaginative concretization of the hope for ‘the good life with and for others in just institutions’. 60 This is according to Ricoeur a poetic task of social imagination: ‘the impossible possibility for the shared creation of a reconciled human world together’. 61
When Ricoeur talked about social imagination, he distinguished an integrative side, referred to as ideology, and a subversive side, referred to as utopia. 62 He argued that imagining the common good depends on the exchange between ideology, which defends what exists, and utopia, which presents what is possible. 63 Ricoeur acknowledged that both sides are confronted with their own pathology. For the concept of ideology, connotations of distortion and concealment of the societal reality and protection of existing inequalities and privileges spring to mind. Utopia, on the other hand, is something that we quickly associate with escape from reality in a kind of political science fiction. What Ricoeur emphasized was, however, that both ideology and utopia have an important positive contribution to make in the pursuit of the common good. Ideology is necessary to understand ourselves as being a political community. The legitimacy of the vertical dimension of authority depends on an integrative narrative identity of the community, which is embodied in an ideology. Utopia is, nevertheless, necessary to remind us of the fact that an ideology is never a completely adequate symbolization of what a political community is or should be. It is, then, their dialectic exchange that keeps both sides from their respective pathology:
We only take possession of the creative power of imagination through a relation to such figures of false consciousness as ideology and utopia. It is as though we have to call upon the “healthy” function of ideology to cure the madness of utopia and as though the critique of ideologies can only be carried out by a conscience capable of regarding itself from the point of view of “nowhere”.
64
Ricoeur also linked this to our relationship with past and future. We do not have to carry our past as an inevitable fate, nor should our dreams float on thin air. Well-defined and modest expectations can reveal the past as a vivid tradition. The tension between past and future, hence, enables us to initiate novelty within a given context. The monitoring of this interaction is according to Ricoeur a crucial part of political responsibility. The susceptibility of political discourse to ideological or utopian pathologies must be a constant concern, but social imagination is what brings us step by step closer to compromises on the common good.
That being said, the emphasis on creative imagination in Ricoeur’s political ethics of compromise has a downside. Creative imagination may well be crucial in the identification and elaboration of the intersections between different outlooks, 65 but we should not lose sight of the fact that many things remain outside of the intersections. The domains outside of the intersections are no less important in reaching compromise. Christian Thuderoz recognizes that the imaginative production of an original way out is an essential element of compromise, but he emphasizes that one element is even more fundamental. That element is renunciation, the abandoning of certain claims. 66
Let me give an example from my own country, Belgium, widely considered to be a paragon of compromise. 67 Belgium is a divided country in many respects, but especially in two main linguistic communities, on the one hand the Flemish community, with a conservative-nationalist political tendency, and on the other hand the Francophone community, with a leftist political tendency. Given the constitutional guarantees of parity, the formation of a federal government is time and time again a difficult enterprise. The key to the compromise is usually the renunciation of separatist aspirations. Flemish demands for more devolution of powers to the federated entities have to be ‘put in the fridge’, like the popular metaphor sounds. Without this renunciation of what the other side considers to be intolerable, compromise cannot be reached. Last time this particular renunciation did not happen, we, Belgians, became the ‘proud’ holder of the world record of the longest government formation ever. 68
It is clear that compromise depends on the reciprocal willingness and ability to shelve ideas and desires that stand in the way of mutual recognition. This is something that tends to fly under the radar in Ricoeur’s political ethics, with its emphasis on creative imagination. Ricoeur’s philosophy provides us nevertheless with the necessary tools to make amends.
Forgetting and forgoing
Obviously, practical wisdom cannot be found in just any compromise. Ricoeur argued that democratic dialogue requires recognition of the right to exist and the conditions for existence of other convictions, including the recognition that truth can also be found in the other. However, this active tolerance lapses into sheer indifference if it denies the existence of the intolerable. 69 The difference between not backing down for the intolerable and intolerance itself is, nevertheless, vague and constantly in motion. 70 The limits of Ricoeur’s ethics of compromise are, consequently, based on a delicate assessment:
The weighting, like the name indicates, weighs the pros and cons of toleration without limits in risk of letting the most fragile get hurt in the name of liberty and the risks of a return to intolerance under the cover of the moral order. A major expression of this weighting would be to renounce the reconstitution of a moral consensus that cannot exist in a pluralist society. Wisdom is to be content with fragile compromises, in the line of what Rawls calls ‘overlapping consensus’, itself corrected by what he calls ‘recognition of reasonable disagreements’.
71
The art of compromise, to which every citizen is called, thus implies not only the recognition of reasonable disagreement but also the non-negotiable: ‘Up to here, but no further’. 72 This is how Ricoeur interpreted Max Weber’s distinction between ethics of conviction (Gesinnungsethik) and ethics of responsibility (Verantwortungsethik). The political ethics that follows from the political paradox is not an absolute ethics of conviction that follows an ideal in a manner blind to the consequences of power in the real world. Ethics of conviction has to be balanced by an ethics of responsibility, which stands for reasonable, prudent political action, aware of the dangers of the paradoxical nature of power and conducive to peace. Whereas Weber characterized the ethics of conviction as the neglect of consequences of action, Ricoeur changed its meaning into a principle that marked the boundaries of the ethics of responsibility. In Ricoeur’s use, the ethics of conviction operates as an ethics of refusal, which indicates where the limits of the ethically acceptable lie, after the example of Socrates’ daemon. 73
The flipside of the recognition of the non-negotiable is the capability to forgo whatever the other takes to be non-negotiable, insofar as this respects one’s own boundaries of non-negotiability as set (dynamically) by the dialectical interplay of ethics of conviction and ethics of responsibility. This element of renunciation is harder to track in Ricoeur’s thought. The clearest discussion – relatively speaking – is to be found in Memory, History, Forgetting (2004). 74 Compromise is not an explicit object of discussion in that book, but it makes an important contribution to our present inquiry in an indirect manner. Ricoeur studied how the narrative identity of plural communities is based on shared memories of a collective history. The social imagination to bring people together despite their differences largely regards how we deal with these memories, especially about ‘founding events’ of political communities. The importance of what we remember suggests that what we forget is no less important. The final section of the book therefore reflects on the necessity of forgetting as a condition for the possibility of remembering.
Ricoeur emphasized the selective nature of any narrative. The narrative that binds communities together cannot be exhaustive, which implies that forgetting is an integral part of the configuration of such a narrative: ‘[T]he strategies of forgetting are directly grafted upon this work of configuration: one can always recount differently, by eliminating, by shifting emphasis, by recasting the protagonists of the action in a different light along with the outlines of the action’. Ricoeur’s first concern in this regard was the danger of manipulation of the emplotment through violent imposition of a canonical narrative. That amounts to a ‘devious form of forgetting […], resulting from stripping the social actors of their original power to recount their actions themselves’. 75 On the rebound, there must be a genuine form of forgetting that is constitutive of an authentic collective identity. We can relate this to Ricoeur’s central claim about forgetting, which is that forgetting is not necessarily to be seen as dysfunctional. Forgetting does not necessarily amount to oblivion, in the sense of effacing of traces. Ricoeur focused on forgetting in terms of a ‘reserve’: ‘Forgetting then designates the unperceived character of the perseverance of memories, their removal from the vigilance of consciousness’. 76 Therefore, Ricoeur’s discussion of the role of forgetting in the configuration of narrative identity enlightens us with regard to the role in compromise of that which I explained above under the metaphor of the fridge. There is no way forward towards shared understanding of the common good without dropping the non-negotiable from the configuration.
This brings us to the question of the subject of responsibility. Whose duty is it to forget what must be forgotten to find each other? According to Ricoeur, this is the wrong question. There is no such thing as a duty to forget:
What, then, is there to say about the alleged duty of forgetting? Besides the fact that any projection into the future in the imperative mood is just as incongruous in the case of forgetting as it was for memory, a command of this sort would amount to a commanded amnesia. If this were to happen […] private and collective memory would be deprived of the salutary identity crisis that permits a lucid reappropriation of the past and of its traumatic charge.
77
We can interpret Ricoeur’s argument in a broader sense to say that it is not the duty of the other to forget about non-negotiable claims that stand in the way of the configuration of compromise. The non-negotiable is not for the other to forget, but for me to forgo. This renunciation then opens the possibility of a particular kind of forgetting: ‘If a form of forgetting could then be legitimately invoked, it would not be as a duty to silence evil but to state it in a pacified mode, without anger. This enunciation will no longer be a commandment, an order, but a wish in the optative mood’. 78 That is the subject of the epilogue of Memory, History, Forgetting, on ‘difficult forgiveness’. 79
Forgoing and forgiving
Eventually, it is only recognition of the importance of renunciation for compromise – apart from and next to the importance of creation – that allows us to understand the place of the model of forgiveness in Ricoeur’s paradigm of translation. As mentioned above, when Ricoeur developed his paradigm of translation into models for finding common ground, he not only talked about translation itself and the exchange of memories but also about a model of forgiveness. This model especially surfaces when the search for the common good comes up against extreme cases of non-negotiable claims and actions. Ricoeur referred to Jean Nabert’s notion of the ‘unjustifiable’, as the superlative of the non-negotiable, referring to indescribable cruelty or extreme inequality. 80 When we are confronted with the unjustifiable, simple renunciation does not even suffice. It is, then, no longer possible to write a collective narrative that circumvents this conflict. The model of forgiveness is where Ricoeur finds the necessary ‘resources of regeneration’ for the process of compromise. 81
The model of forgiveness is the capstone in the entire process of compromise because it unites creation and renunciation. It constitutes a ‘poetics of pardon’ 82 where renunciation is extended into a poetic expression of asking forgiveness. It is not up to the other to forget whatever unjustifiable I may have done, it is up to me to renounce the unjustifiable and to create an opening towards a new horizon in one and the same concrete gesture of asking forgiveness. That is what is eventually required to get beyond a friend–foe relationship in a ‘culture of consideration’. We are, then, no longer within a context of reciprocal exchange of concessions or mutual recognition of just claims. The model of forgiveness is excessive. Ricoeur emphasized that ‘forgiveness is not, and it should not be, either normal, or normative, or normalizing. It should remain exceptional and extraordinary, standing the test of the impossible’. That is why he linked it to the superhuman demand to ‘love your enemies’ in the Gospel. 83
It is interesting to step outside of Ricoeur’s philosophical work for a moment, to see how he talked about this issue in some of his moral theological writings. There, he emphasized that the excessive step of the model of forgiveness shows that a political ethics of compromise is not exhaustively captured in the dialectics of ethics of responsibility and ethics of conviction. There is another dialectics intersecting, namely the dialectics of love and justice. 84 Love is what presses us to do more than what justice strictly requires, following the teachings of the Gospel:
And what direction do the sayings of Jesus imprint upon our ethical imagination? […] Certainly no rule emerges. But something like a pattern does. And this pattern is that of a sort of excess of response in relation to the response that is normally expected. Yes, each response gives more than that asked by ordinary prudence. The right cheek? The other one also! The coat? The cloak as well! One mile? One mile more! […] It is this giving more that appears to me to constitute the point of these extreme commands.
85
The model of forgiveness is a prime example of this imagination to do more than what can possibly be expected. 86
Ricoeur wanted to formulate the issue of excess within the boundaries of a strictly philosophical discourse as well. 87 In Memory, History, Forgetting, Ricoeur explained this excess in dialogue with the work of Hannah Arendt. 88 In her reflection on action, Arendt discussed irreversibility and unpredictability as the two main characteristics linked to plurality. She argued that the solution for unpredictability is to be found in the capacity to make promises and the solution for irreversibility in the capacity for forgiveness. However, only promising was considered a political capacity, and therefore the key to compromise. Forgiveness was – exactly because of its connection to love – deemed inadmissible in the public realm. 89 Ricoeur, however, emphasized that the capability for compromise cannot be fully understood on the basis of the capability to make promises alone. The power to bind together is dependent on the power to unbind the agent from the act: ‘The guilty person, rendered capable of beginning again’. 90
Ricoeur referred to this power of dissociation as ‘an act of faith’. Still, he was confident that the inclusion of forgiveness in his political ethics of compromise was ‘not a philosophical aberration’. 91 He referred to his hermeneutical-phenomenological attestation of the person as capable being and the implied original predisposition to the good in Oneself as Another as philosophical underpinning, provided that we keep in mind that ‘[t]he most appropriate grammatical mood [for forgiveness] is that of the optative of desire, at equal distance from the indicative of description and the imperative of prescription’. 92
Conclusion
Ricoeur’s political ethics is unapologetically an ethics of compromise. His emphasis on the paradoxical nature of politics highlights the responsibility to strive for compromise, making provisional steps in the direction of a shared conception of the common good as a matter of mutual recognition required to support necessary equilibria between the poles of the political paradox. He clearly interpreted the work of compromise as a creative process, a matter of ‘poetic wisdom’, which refers to the capacity to imagine a new world by projecting ourselves into other people as a way to learn to tell our own story differently within the contours of a broader collective narrative, in compliance with the paradigm of translation. As such, Ricoeur’s political ethics of compromise is at risk of highlighting the element of creation at the cost of recognition of the element of renunciation. However, I have pointed out how we can read a delicate connection between forgetting, forgoing and forgiving in Ricoeur’s thought. It is, then, the model of forgiveness, as part of the paradigm of translation, that gives due respect to the importance of renunciation through the emphasis on the unjustifiable, for which renunciation even cannot suffice. The ‘poetics of pardon’ brings creation and renunciation together and, by doing so, it highlights that the political ethics of compromise is not confined to the sphere of justice. Eventually, compromise is dependent on an excessive step. It is a superhuman endeavour. Therefore, compromise always remains an object of hope. That is a reason why Ricoeur concluded Memory, History, Forgetting with an obscure reference to ‘incompletion’. 93 We cannot expect politics to deliver celestial happiness: ‘The knowledge that the city remains “a divided city” belongs to practical wisdom and to its political exercise’. 94 This is not in the least because every compromise remains paradoxical itself, as an expression of both order and violence, power-in-common and power-over, bridging and limiting. Our understanding of Ricoeur’s political ethics begins and ends with the political paradox.
