Ricoeur in Search of a Philosophy of the ‘Heart’

Abstract

The focus of reflection in Paul Ricoeur’s Fallible Man (1986) is human fragility and fallibility understood as ‘the constitutional weakness that makes evil possible’. Platonic myths, images and ideas, especially in the Symposium and the Republic, play a mediating role in the inquiry. Ricoeur also draws inspiration from Pascal’s Pensées, notably section 199 entitled ‘Disproportion of man’. Pascal asks, ‘After all, what is man in nature?’ and replies: ‘a nothing compared to the infinite, a whole compared to the nothing, a middle point between all and nothing […]. Limited in every respect, we find this intermediate state between two extremes reflected in all our faculties’ (Pascal, 1995, 59–65, 61). In these terms, Ricoeur’s hypothesis is that human fallibility consists ‘in a certain non-coincidence of man with himself’, a ‘disproportion’ of self to self (Ricoeur, 1986, 1).