Chapter 3: Human Capabilities in the Light of Incapabilities

In the first chapter, I demonstrated the affinity of philosophical hermeneutics to questions related to the human ability to act, and the means by which humans act. Anyone who wants to understand the transmission of ideas will, sooner or later, have to study the efficacy of symbols, which depends on the technicity of those who articulate meaning, those who inscribe it and those who receive it. The second chapter considered how, throughout the history of the species, human beings have attempted to intervene in what human beings are, or could become, by means of a narrative reconfiguration of their lived existence. We saw that, intentionally or not, the sphere of technical actions and systems of artefacts has a similar reconfiguring effect on human beings as agents. In this chapter, we zoom in on the agent, in other words, on human beings, from the perspective of what they are able to do, or do not succeed in doing. In Oneself as Another and much of Ricœur’s later work, he elaborates a hermeneutics of the self, or, as he puts it, the acting and suffering human. The notion of capability or “I can” receives a central place in this project, which is also called a hermeneutics of the capable human [l’homme capable]. In essence, this hermeneutics explores four central capabilities that are telescoped into each other: saying, doing, narrating and imputing action to oneself as good/bad, just/unjust, prudent/irresponsible. These capabilities belong to the agent in the first person (I or we), but they require activation in interaction with others – both in interaction with people in the sense of a physical presence (you) and institutional others (that is, the institutional mediation of it). In this chapter and the remaining chapters of this book, I repeatedly come back to this grid which plots the range of capabilities on the threefold activation (I – you – it). Nevertheless, although Ricœur explores a range of human capabilities, the notion of capability itself remains underdetermined from what one may call a “technical” angle. In this chapter I transform this lacuna in his hermeneutics into a task. My aim is to deploy something that is already present in his philosophy, but in the negative, or in the form of fragmentary thoughts, and to examine this aspect more fully. The hypothesis guiding this chapter is that the hermeneutics of human capabilities requires more detailed development of the technical dimension of capabilities, that is, a reflection on, first, the skills and, second, the means of the “I can”. This is thus a development of the hermeneutics of capabil-