Paul Ricœur au fondement d’une éthique herméneutique et narrative, enracinée dans une ontologie de l’action

For Paul Ricœur, human action was a central preoccupation already present in his early work and deepening over time, benefitting from a long engagement with hermeneutical and narrative analyses. It is the concern to locate, through obligatory moral norms, the ethical dimension of desire that guides and motivates action that first makes use of a hermeneutic of signs, symbols, and texts in which the desire of the subject has been expressed. But narratives become essential in order to describe action in such a way that the actor’s responsibility can be evaluated at the level of his narrative identity. To this responsibility, interpreted and taught by means of cultural narratives, the concepts of memory and promise add the dimension of the struggle for recognition and point to an ontology of the historical condition at the foundation of an ethic that rests open to a religious dimension of an original goodness.