Ricoeur critiques Harper: some tweets

Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) was a stellar French-protestant philosopher and theologian who taught from “the middle”.  The following text is taken from his Fallible Man (1965) [L’Homme Faillible, 1960] in which he analyzes the relationship between man’s fallibility and his “capacity” for evil.  In a number of ways he follows in the footsteps of St. Augustine and Montaigne.

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Re: Ideologies of Right and Left (Canada’s polarized politics)

Man is not intermediate because he is between angel and animal; he is intermediate within himself, within his selves.  He is intermediate because he is a mixture, and a mixture because he brings about mediations.  His ontological characteristic of being-intermediate consists precisely in that his act of existing is the very act of bringing about mediations between all the modalities and all the levels of reality within him and outside him. ... In short, for man, being-intermediate is mediating.[1]

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Re: Omar Khadr

If man is a means between being and nothingness, it is primarily because he brings about “mediations” in things; his intermediate place is primarily his function as a mediator of the infinite and finite in things.[2]

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Re: China and the Nexen Case

But in their turn, the relations of domination, which spring from the system of appropriating (private, collective, or State) the means of production, continue only because they are recognized and guaranteed by institutions sanctioned by an authority that is ultimately political. That is so true that the relations of socio-economic domination can be changed only by transforming the political structures of the power that puts the seal of institution on all the technological, economic, and social forms of man’s power over man. [3]

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[1] Paul Ricoeur, Fallible Man, tr. Charles A. Kelbley (New York: Fordham University Press. 2002), p. 3. Emphasis added.

[2] Ibid., p. 46.

[3] Ibid., pp. 117,118.  Emphasis added.