Between Daily Routine and Violent Protest

Front matter

DE GRUYTER

Ernst Wolff BETWEEN DAILY — ROUTINE AND

—

Preface

Most human action has a technical dimension. This book is a first consolidation of my research into this simple fact. On the one hand it required an examination of the two constituents of the technicity of action: acquired capabilities and the means of action. On the other, I had to examine the interrelation between the technicity of action and how it is activated, given its tension with normative considerations. I have followed the intuition that the technicity of action stretches as far as human action itself, including spheres of interaction where there are good reasons to fear a technicist reduction of action, namely ethics and politics. Consequently, my study covers the entire gamut of human action between the extremes of daily routine and violent protest.

Although it is clearly impossible to discuss every kind of human action, the chapters of this book cover a substantial and representative selection of major forms of action. Moreover, the interdisciplinary cast of the book is aimed at rendering what can be considered core features of action in all human beings, while giving us the means by which to remain attentive to the socio-historical particularities of action as it plays out in different contexts. Hermeneutics (understood as the philosophical inquiry into the human phenomena of meaning, understanding and interpretation) and social science (as the study of all human affairs) represent the two main disciplinary orientations of this book. There are many books of philosophy and of social theory in which hermeneutics is simply understood as synonymous with the name of Hans-Georg Gadamer. In the Introduction I explain why I have instead chosen Paul Ricceur as my principal hermeneutic interlocutor for the purposes of this book.

Previous versions of some of the chapters have been published elsewhere. I thank the journals and publishers for permission to include translated, reworked and expanded versions of these texts here: “Transmettre et interpreter,” Médium 6 (January-March 2006): 30-47 / *Mediologie en hermeneutiek," Tydskrif vir Geesteswetenskappe 47, no. 1 (March 2007): 81-94; “Habitus — means — worldliness. Technics and the formation of 'civilisations'," in Oliver Kozlarek, Jórn Rüsen and Ernst Wolff, eds., Shaping a Humane World — Civilizations, Axial Times, Modernities, Humanisms (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012), 25 — 53; “Compétences et moyens de l'homme capable à la lumière de l'incapacité," Études Ricceuriennes / Ricoeur Studies 4, no. 2 (2013), 50 - 63; “Ricoeur et Giddens: l'herméneutique de l'homme capable et la théorie de structuration," Études Ricceuriennes /Ricoeur Studies 5, no. 2 (2014), 105 — 127; “Of what is ‘Ricoeur’ the name? Or, philosophising at the edge," Leuven Philosophy Newsletter 26 (2018 — 2019), 7-22; and "Justice despite institutions. Struggling for a good life from the destitute

38 OpenAccess. © 2021 Ernst Wolff, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https: //doi.org/10.1515/9783110725049-001

VI —— Preface edge of society,” in Geoffrey Dierckxsens, ed., The Ambiguity of Justice. New Perspectives on Paul Ricoeur’s Approach to Justice (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 97-127.

Over many years of ruminating on this project, I have had the benefit of hospitality and funding for which I would like to express my gratitude. I was generously received by Jörn Rüsen (Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut in Essen), a visit partially funded by the Mercator Stiftung, Axel Honneth (Goethe University in Frankfurt), supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, and Olivier Abel and Laurent Thévenot (in the framework of the Fonds Ricoeur and the EHESS, Paris), where two research visits were partially funded by the National Research Foundation of South Africa at a time when I was still employed at the University of Pretoria.

I would like to thank Idette Noomé very warmly for her indefatigable work in editing the final manuscript. Rachel Mahlangu and her colleagues at the library of the University of Pretoria, and Stefan Derouck and his colleagues at the library of the KU Leuven deserve my grateful recognition for their services to me in this project. Christoph Schirmer, Mara Weber, Florian Ruppenstein and their colleagues at De Gruyter have accompanied me through the publication phase of this book in a most professional way. Finally, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my wife and children for their patience and support.

Ernst Wolff KU Leuven, May 2020

Introduction

The Technical Dimension of Action — 3

1 2 3

Basic Orientation: Approaching the Composition of Action — 3 Ricoeur and Social Theory — 5

Ethics and Means in Ricoeur. A Preliminary Exploration — 9

3.1 Efficacy, without Abandoning Ethics — 9

3.2 An Ethics of Limited Violence — 12

3.3 With and Against Ricoeur — 15

4.1 Part 1: The Technicity of Action: Capabilities and Means —— 17 The Heat of Action — 21

5.1 Part 2: Finding Compromises in Practice — 24

Intermediary Reflexion and Conclusion: Towards an Integrated Theory of the Technicity of Action — 27

Chapter 1: The Effectiveness of Symbols: Mediology and Hermeneutics — 33 1 2 3

Enter Mediology — 34

3.1 Transmission and Communication —— 37

3.2 Transmission in the Mnemosphere — 38

3.3 Clothes: Transmission and Understanding —— 41

3.4 No Mediology without Hermeneutics. No Milieu without a World — 42

4.1 Discourse as Action — 46

4.2 Autonomy and the Effectiveness of Symbols —— 47

4.3 On Reception: Reading Texts and Artefacts —— 50

Vigilance and Politics —— 53

Vill —— Contents

Chapter 2: Habitus - Means - Worldliness — 58 1 Introduction: “Civilizing Processes" as Processes of Hominization —— 58 2 Human Technicity and the Civilizing Processes — 63 3 Technics and Narrativity — 66 3.1 Prefiguration — 67 3.2 Configuration — 70 3.3 Refiguration — 74 4 Conclusions — 77

Chapter 3: Human Capabilities in the Light of Incapabilities — 83 1 Introduction: A Hypothesis on the Technicity of Capabilities —— 83 2 The Capable Human is the Incapable Human — 86 2.1 Five Figures of Incapability —— 87 2.2 Incapability as a Practical Horizon of Action. (In)capability as a Mark of Uncertainty — 91 2.3 The Capable Human is the Finite Human — 93 3 The Capable-Incapable Human Discloses the Technical Human — 94 3.1 Misrecognition of Incapability, Practical Horizon and Primary Technicity —— 95 3.2 Reflection, Level of Competence and Secondary Technicity —— 95 4 Social Theoretical Horizon — 97 5 Conclusion: The Technical Paradox and its Political Relevance — 100

Chapter 4: Organized Action: Agency, (In)capabilities and Means — 103 1 Organized Action as Part of the Technicity of Action —— 103 2 Organized Action and the Agency of Organizations — 105 2.1 Entities of Participatory Belonging and Institutions — 106 2.2 Practices and the Example of Advisory Bodies — 112 2.3 Social Capabilities —— 114 2.4 Scales of Organized Action, its Capabilities and Means — 116 3 Capabilities and Incapabilities of Organizations —— 119 4 Conclusion. Paradoxes, Risks, and Political Implications of Organized Action — 124 4.1 The Paradox of Organized Action — 125 4.2 Organized Action in the Social Sciences — 126

Chapter 5: The Hermeneutics of Human Capabilities and the Theory of Structuration — 128 1 Introduction — 128

Contents —— IX

Ricoeur: Individuals and Society in the Hermeneutics of the Capable Human — 131 2.1 First Approach: Ricoeur on Institutions —— 132 2.2 Second Approach: Practices Between “Basic Actions” (Danto) and “Narrative Unity of Human Life” (MacIntyre) — 140 Giddens: Individual and Society in Structuration Theory — 144 3.1 Giddens: Action, the Original Sociological Problem —— 144 3.2 Giddens: Action and Duality of Structure - Some Specifications — 147 Conclusion: Contributions of Structuration Theory to the Hermeneutics of the Capable Human —— 154

2 3 4

Something Is at Stake — 159

On Critique — 160

Towards the Intricate Relations between Technicity and Ethics — 162 Working in Anticipation —— 163

Part 2: Finding Compromises in Practice

Chapter 6: Of What Is “Ricceur” the Name? Or, Philosophising at the Edge — 167

3 4 5

What's in a Name? —— 167

*The Colonial Question" — 168

Ricceur’s Anticipation of Global Politics after Independence —— 171

Ricceur’s View on the Philosophical and Cultural Critical Consequences of

Decolonization — 173

5.1 Interim Conclusion: Disillusioned Modernity and the Task of Hermeneutics —— 177

Okolo - “Praxis Triggers the Hermeneutical Process and Gives it an

Orientation” —— 180

6.1 Taking Stock: Engagement without Promises — 186

Conclusion: Philosophising at the Edge — 188

Chapter 7: Acts of Violence as Political Competence? From Ricceur to Mandela and Back —— 191

1 2

Introduction — 191 Three Categories of Competence in Socio-political Action — 192 2.1 Ricoeur with and against Honneth — 193

X — Contents

2.2 A Missed Opportunity. Boltanski’s Two Forms of Non-equivalence —— 196

4.1 Entanglement with Ethics — 207

4.2 Combining Strategy and Value — 208

4.3 Maintaining the Perplexity — 210

4.4 Responsibility in Politics and Science — 212

Chapter 8: Justice Despite Institutions. Struggling for a Good Life from the Destitute Edge of Society — 214

1 Conflict and Violence in View of Justice —— 217 2 Violent Democracy and the Violence of the Vulnerable — 223 2.1 Violent Democracy - Von Holdt’s Challenge — 226 2.2 Violence close to the Centres of Privilege and Violence at the “Edge” — 228 3 Two Ambiguous Strategies to Further the Good Life in Violent Democracies — 229 3.1 The Ambiguities of Violence at the *Edge" — 230 3.2 The Ambiguities of Refraining from Violence at the “Edge” —— 234 4 Conclusion: Attestation of Prudence at the “Edge” —— 238 4.1 Conflictual Ethics: Composing Action as Prudent “Relative to us” — 238 4.2 Attestation, Action, Self-confidence — 240 4.3 Justice despite Institutions — 242 4.4 Epilogue — 244 Conclusion

An Integrated View of the Technicity of Action and the Question of Responsibility — 247

1 2 3

Ambiguity —— 255

3.1 Technicity of Ethico-political Action and the Need for Normative Orientation —— 261

3.2 Responsibility as a Key to Thinking Action in an Era of Uncertainty — 263

3.3 The Fragility of Responsibility — 267

Contents — XI

Bibliography —— 272 Author Index — 288

Introduction

The Technical Dimension of Action 1 Basic Orientation: Approaching the Composition of Action

One of the remarkable features of our contemporary international scene is the number of intense social movements. From Caracas to Bagdad, from Hong Kong to Paris, the instances are legion. Protesters adopt strategies that range from peaceful protest to acts of violence, justifying their action with an array of arguments, communicating their grievances through different channels and attempting to bind isolated individuals into reliable groups supporting their cause. All of them act within existing social and political contexts: more or less firmly established institutions, varying economic conditions, more or less ruthless states, available forms of justification for police or military intervention, etc. In short, in each case, a dense and complex cocktail of disparate and mutating elements plays out in a rich diversity of events.

Impressive (and sometimes frightening) as the spread and intensity of these diverse events may be, at their core, there are a number of persistent features of social upheavals and, indeed, of human action in general. Four of these features are the object studied in this book. First, in each case, different individual, organizational or institutional agents combine actional capabilities with tools, institutions, infrastructure, etc. by means of which they act. In this volume, I refer to this combination of capabilities and means as the “technical dimension of action” or simply as the “technicity of action”. Second, the deployment of capabilities and means is consistently permeated by ethical aspirations and hesitancies. Third, the myriad of strategies and forms of protest events vividly illustrates this task of combining capabilities with means and its impregnation by ethics; yet, one finds it in all domains of human action: in the workplace, in different forms of education, in commerce, and even in religious practices and in domestic interaction. Fourth, the current global spread of these events provides sufficient material to convince us that the need to combine capabilities with means, and these together with ethics, is typical of human life in general, and not just a regional or culturally specific phenomenon.’

In this book I attempt to think through these four basic components of social interaction. How is this to be done? First, careful attention is paid to the fact that action has meaning for agents. Let us call this the interpretative or hermeneutic concern of this study. Second, equally careful attention is given to the complex-

1 The point is precisely the generality of this feature, not defining what human is, nor excluding the possibility that this remark may also be valid in respect of animals.

3 OpenAccess. © 2021 Ernst Wolff, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110725049-002 ities of action as interaction in social contexts. Let us call this the social theoretic? concern of this study. These two orienting concerns should already make it plain that this study aims neither at a philosophy of technology, nor at an exploration of the material background of action or a theory of culture — although the insights developed here should be relevant to these fields too. The aim of the study is to develop in outline an interpretative theory of technicity as an aspect of human action. I know of no equivalent endeavour in the scholarly literature to date?

This initial indication of the orientation of the book calls for three clarifications, which is the task of this Introduction.

My primary strategy is to integrate the hermeneutic and social theoretic concerns by drawing the maximum of insights from an author in whose work they are coordinated: Paul Ricoeur. It is this fine coordination, buttressed by the strength of his broader philosophy, that justifies the central attention to him in this book. The best way to clarify my choice of Ricoeur as my main ally in hermeneutics is by providing a brief survey of the relation of his hermeneutics to

2 [use the term “social theory" simply to designate all the different contributions, independent of the disciplinary specificity of their authors. The point is not a polemic opposing philosophy to theory.

3 To be precise, there is a wide array of literature with which I can find a meaningful connection and from which I can draw insights for my project. After all, the technical dimension of action is a basic given of human existence. Moreover, drawing from such exchanges is a structuring feature of this book as a whole. Still, I do not know of any work that is dedicated to the technicity of action across the entire breadth of human action and interaction, and that is written from an interpretive or hermeneutic point of view. A review of recent overviews of social theory confirm this, see Philippe Corcuff, Théories sociologiques contemporaines: France, 1980 — 2020 (Malakoff: Armand Colin, 2019), Claudio E. Benzecry, Monika Krause, and Isaac Reed, eds., Social Theory Now (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 2017), Seth Abrutyn, ed., Handbook of Contemporary Sociological Theory (Cham: Springer, 2016), Patrick Baert and Filipe Carreira Da Silva, Social Theory in the Twentieth Century and Beyond, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), Georg Kneer and Markus Schroer, eds., Handbuch Soziologische Theorien (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2009), Gerard Delanty, Handbook of Contemporary European Social Theory (London: Routledge, 2006).

There are also a number of works which I recognize as displaying some proximity to my project — e.g. Johannes Robeck, Technologische Urteilskraft. Zu einer Ethik technischen Handelns (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), Christoph Hubig, Die Kunst des Móglichen (Bielefeld: Transcript, three volumes, 2006, 2007 and 2015) and Werner Rammert, Technik — Handeln — Wissen: Zu einer pragmatistischen Technik- und Sozialtheorie, 2nd ed. (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2016). However, since these volumes are not concerned with the hermeneutic approach that I set out to develop, and since they are aimed more specifically at application in various fields of technology (in contrast to the more ethical and political orientation of my last Chapters), discussing them falls beyond the scope of this book.

2 Ricoeur and Social Theory — 5 social theory (§2) and the presence of the problematic of the technicity of action in his (early) philosophy (§3). However, I do not accord Ricoeur dogmatic authority, nor is this a purely exegetical study. This is avoided by the specific design of the chapters - which is my next point.

In each chapter insights are gathered from Ricoeur’s work and submitted to critique through dialogue with other theorists and intellectuals from a host of different social scientific backgrounds and disciplines: Régis Debray, Norbert Elias, Anthony Giddens, Luc Boltanski, Nelson Mandela, Okolo Okonda, Karl von Holdt and others — each chosen for the specific questions addressed in that chapter. My own theoretical developments emerge from these confrontations. The best way to clarify what this entails is by an overview of the chapters and the relations between them. This is done in two steps, for Part 1 ($4) and Part 2 (85) of the book, respectively.

Finally, I comment on the “Intermediary reflexion" (which links the two parts of the book) and on the Conclusion, both of which serve to qualify the nature and ambition of this project (86).

2 Ricceur and Social Theory

One of the most formative readings of my academic life thus far has been Joas and KnóbI's Social Theory: Twenty Introductory Lectures. Their masterly panorama of post-World War II social theory covers a wide variety of authors and movements of Western social theory in a compelling argumentative and historical presentation. Chapter XVI is dedicated to three French authors, collectively typified as “non-structuralist”: Castoriadis, Touraine and Ricceur.* The significant position accorded to Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) by these two erudite sociologists may have come as a surprise to readers who were acquainted with the reception of Ricoeur’s philosophy during most of his lifetime. For a long time, his name was mostly associated with a kind of phenomenology, a philosophy that was then somewhat out of sync with mainstream “French theory", and concentrated instead on a hermeneutic turn to symbols, metaphors, narratives and perhaps the capable human. However, what Joas and Knóbl correctly recorded was, on the one hand, the tremendous wealth of social theoretic thought of this French

4 Hans Joas and Wolfgang Knóbl, Lecture XVI: *French anti-structuralists (Cornelius Castoriadis, Alain Touraine and Paul Ricceur),” in Social Theory: Twenty Introductory Lectures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 401-31.

philosopher, and on the other, the strongly welcoming reception from theorists in various social sciences that he began to enjoy later in life.

This shift needs some clarification. It is worth recalling that even before his reception in French sociology, Ricoeur had cultivated a keen interest in a variety of social sciences throughout his career. Whether in political science, sociology, anthropology, or historiography, one has no difficulty finding the traces of reflection and concentrated discussions with contemporary authors in his work, such as Lévi-Strauss, Weber, Elias, Boltanski and Thévenot, Mannheim, and Geertz. This is no artificial addition, as his entire work can be described as a reflection on human action,’ from which the well-known works of hermeneutics are but a long detour. To get an impression of his sustained contribution to social theory, one can enumerate the themes to which Ricoeur devotes substantial study: action and fallibility, practical reason and ideology, interpersonal action and institutions, historicity and modernity, justice and recognition - the list is far from exhaustive. All this work is infused with insights from his hermeneutics, the significance of which for post-World War II philosophy is commonly recognized.

Next, stepping from the philosopher to his social scientific reception, one could indicate several social scientists who made some use of his work in devel-

5 Cf. Paul Ricoeur, “Préface,” in Maurizio Chiodi, Il cammino della libertà. Fenomenologia, ermeneutica, ontologia della libertà nella ricerca filosofica di Paul Ricoeur (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1990), ix-xix, and Paul Ricceur, *Proménade au fil d'un chemin," in Fabrizio Turoldo, Verità del metodo. Indagini su Paul Ricoeur (Padua: Il Poligrafo, 2000), 13 - 20. The anglophone public has been sensitised to this dimension of his work by a volume edited by Cambridge sociologist John Thompson, namely Paul Ricceur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

6 The bulk of this work is contained in Paul Ricceur, L'idéologie et l'utopie (Paris: Seuil, [1986] 1997) / Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1986), Paul Ricceur, Du texte à l'action. Essais d'herméneutique II (Paris: Seuil, 1986) / From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John Thompson (London: Athlone, 1991), Paul Ricceur, Soi-méme comme un autre (Paris: Seuil, 1990) / Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), Paul Ricceur, Le juste 1 (Paris: Esprit, 1995) / The Just, (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000), Paul Ricceur, Le juste 2 (Paris: Esprit, 2001) / Reflections on the Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), and finally, Paul Ricceur, Parcours de la reconnaissance (Paris: Gallimard, 2004) / The Course of Recognition, trans. David Pellauer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). Parts of the book of interviews, Paul Ricceur, La critique et la conviction. Entretien avec Francois Azouvi et Marc De Launay (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1995) / Critique and Conviction: Conversations with Francois Azouvi and Marc De Launay. European Perspectives (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1998) and to a lesser degree the tome on the philosophy of history, Paul Ricoeur, La mémoire, l'histoire, l'oubli (Paris: Seuil, 2000) / Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), should likewise be taken into account here.

2 Ricoeur and Social Theory — 7 oping their own views - to cite but two random examples: V. Y. Mudimbe in his understanding of the invention of Africa or Clifford Geertz's symbolic anthropology.’ Much more significant is the “Ricoeur effect” in French social science, already recorded by Francois Dosse in 1995.8 The most significant names to mention in this regard are Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, the originators of *French pragmatism."?

A third layer of the relation between Ricoeur and social theory is presented by recent scholarship.'? Over the last two decades, this scholarship has over-

7 Valentin Yves Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. African Systems of Thought (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988); Arun Micheelsen, “‘I Don't Do Systems’: An Interview with Clifford Geertz,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 14, no. 1 (2002): 2- 20.

8 Francois Dosse, L'empire du sens. L'humanisation des sciences humaines (Paris: La Découverte, 1995), see Chapter 14, “Une philosophie de l'agir: Paul Ricoeur,” 170 - 79.

9 Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot. On Justification: Economies of Worth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, [1991] 2006). Laurent Thévenot's major publication, L'action au pluriel. Sociologie des régimes d'engagement (Paris: La Découverte, 2006) is dedicated to Ricoeur. 10 In recent years the number of thematic volumes of journals dedicated to Ricoeur have shown an increasing interest in the social and political philosophical aspect of his work, cf. the Journal Phänomenologie 21 (2004), the Journal of French Philosophy 16, nos. 1-2 (2006), the Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale 2 (2006), Cités 1, no. 33 (2008), Philosophiques 41, no. 2 (2014), the Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Théologiques 99, no. 4 (2015), Chiasmi International 17 (2016). Among the volumes of the Ricceur Studies/Études Ricoeuriennes, see for example, 2, no. 1 (2011) (on recognition), 3, no. 1 (2012) (on the social sciences), 4, no. 1 (2013) (on feminism), 6, no. 2 (2015) (on justice), 9, no. 1 (2018) (on ideology and utopia), 9, no. 2 (2018) (on vulnerability), 10, no. 2 (2019) (on practical wisdom).

A similar trend can be seen in collected volumes: cf. some of the essays in Christian Delacroix, Francois Dosse and Partick Garcia, eds., Paul Ricceur et les sciences humaines (Paris: La Découverte, 2007), David Kaplan, ed., Reading Ricoeur (New York, NY: State University of New York Press, 2008), Scott A. Davidson, ed., Ricoeur Across the Disciplines (New York, NY: Continuum, 2010) (some chapters in this volume, with its accent on textual disciplines), and almost all of the contributions in Farhang Erfani and Lorenzo Altieri, eds. Paul Ricoeur: Honoring and Continuing the Work (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011). The titles of two new publications are telling: David Lewin and Todd S. Mei, eds., From Ricoeur to Action: The Socio-Political Significance of Ricaeur's Thinking (London, and New York, NY: Continuum, 2012) and Marcelino Agis Villaverde, Knowledge and Practical Reason: Paul Ricoeur's Way of Thinking (Berlin and Zurich: Lit Verlag, 2012). Other relevant texts are Roger Savage, Paul Ricceur in the Age of Hermeneutical Reason: Poetics, Praxis, and Critique. Studies in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), Annemie Halsema and Fernanda Henriques, eds., Feminist Explorations of Paul Ricceur’s Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), Suzi Adams, ed., Ricoeur and Castoriadis in Discussion: On Human Creation, Historical Novelty, and the Social Imaginary. Social Imaginaries (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2017), and Stephanie N. Arel whelmingly confirmed the significance of the socio-political dimension of his work, which justifies discarding the outdated idea that Ricoeur was only interested in matters of textual interpretation which bears no relevance to practical philosophy.

My book is situated in the extension of these three layers of connection between philosophy and social theory. From this perspective, this book aims at making a contribution to both the interpretation of Ricceur’s socio-political thought and the development of significant features of it. We will explore why human action is not merely an instrumental concatenation of sub-actions aimed at a preestablished goal, but is rather a much more complex exercise of practical or conscious interpretation and adaptation of courses of action. How action is always informed - that is, guided or impaired — by normative or ethical concerns, hesitations and dispositions, is a second question. At the same time, we will see that the practical situations in which people act do not always allow them simply to realize their normative motives, and in fact, the very means by which they hope to realize them often negatively affect other concerns. A central contention of this book is that we can only gain a proper grasp of the difficult composition of efficiency and normativity in action from a coordination of hermeneutic and social theoretic inputs.

But I must pre-empt the sceptic. As significant as these questions may be, are they not marginal to Ricoeur's thought? Surely this is not a theme by and Dan R. Stiver, eds., Ideology and Utopia in the Twenty-First Century: The Surplus of Meaning in Ricceur’s Dialectical Concept (London, and New York, NY: Lexington Books, 2019).

Likewise, one could consider a number of monographs: Bernard Dauenhauer, Paul Ricoeur: The Promise and Risk of Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), David Kaplan, Ricoeur’s Critical Theory (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003), Johann Michel, Paul Ricoeur. Une philosophie de l'agir (Paris: Cerf, 2006), Peter Kemp, Sagesse pratique de Paul Ricoeur: Huit études (Paris: Editions du Sandre, 2010), Molly Mann, Ricoeur, Rawls and Capability Justice: Civic Phronesis and Equality (London, and New York, NY: Continuum, 2012), Pierre-Olivier Monteil, Ricoeur politique (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013), Inge Künle, Das Selbst und der Andere bei Paul Ricoeur und Amartya Sen (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2014), Michael Sohn, The Good of Recognition: Phenomenology, Ethics, and Religion in the Thought of Levinas and Ricceur (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014), Maureen Junker-Kenny, Religion and Public Reason: A Comparison of the Positions of John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas and Paul Ricceur (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), Jean Greisch, L'herméneutique comme sagesse de l'incertitude (Paris: Le cercle herméneutique éditeur, 2015), Timo Helenius, Ricceur, Culture and Recognition: Hermeneutics of Cultural Subjectivity (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), Dries Deweer, Ricoeur’s Personalist Republicanism. On Personhood and Citizenship (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017), Geoffrey Dierckxsens, Paul Ricceur’s Moral Anthropology: Singularity, Responsibility, and Justice (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018).

3 Ethics and Means in Ricoeur. A Preliminary Exploration —— 9 which to present the reader with a substantial view on Ricceur’s social theory? To both objections I would respond: Not at all!

3 Ethics and Means in Riceeur. A Preliminary Exploration

Once made aware of it, one cannot help but notice how often and how thoroughly Ricceur grappled with the question of the need and the ambiguity of the means of action as encountered in the heat of the action. This is a question of efficacy, but the urgency of the “heat” of action is equally informed by agents’ ethical investment in what they do. In this book, I explore this dimension of Ricceur’s thought by focusing on his later work (roughly from the 1970s to 2005, although the exact demarcation is not important). However, one can introduce the issue with reference to much earlier texts to get an impression of how this dimension of his thinking emerged." In this way, the contemporary relevance of the question will also become apparent.

3.1 Efficacy, without Abandoning Ethics

At the end of the 1940s, Ricoeur engaged Merleau-Ponty in a debate about the possible sources for positive change in society. On the one hand, he seemed reluctant unreservedly to accept Merleau-Ponty's version of the recourse to “progressive" violence found in Humanism and Terror. On the other hand, he had had five years in a prisoner-of-war camp to ruminate on the inadequacies of his pre-war pacifism. His response, published as *Non-violent Man and His Presence to History" in 1949, can be schematized in a number of steps.”

11 For an encompassing study of Ricceur's views on technology throughout his work, see Ernst Wolff, *Ricoeur's Polysemy of Technology and its Reception," in Interpreting Technology, eds. Mark Coeckelbergh, Wessel Reijers and Alberto Romele (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, forthcoming 2021).

12 The interpretation of Ricceur’s earlier philosophy is itself a major topic. I have dealt with it on its own in a separate monograph, entitled Lire Ricoeur depuis la périphérie. Décolonisation, modernité, herméneutique (forthcoming). Harvesting the insights of Ricceur's earlier work, especially Freedom and nature. The voluntary and the involuntary and Fallible Man, would certainly add valuable material to the argument of the present book, but this will have to be dealt with in a separate study.