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DOI: 10.1177/0191453710387077
2011 37: 249 Philosophy Social Criticism
Morny Joy
Paul Ricoeur on life and death

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Special section: the final Ricoeur
Paul Ricoeur on life
and death
Morny Joy
University of Calgary, Canada
Abstract
This article, written as a tribute to Paul Ricoeur, examines a number of his own reflections on the
topics of life and death.
Keywords
death, immortality, life, mortality, natality
This article has been written as a tribute to Paul Ricoeur and his philosophy that honors
and values human existence in this world rather than orienting it towards the spiritual
consolations of a life after death. In this sense my article is more of an evocation than
an academic exercise. I begin with one of Ricoeurs early works about which he remi-
nisced in an interview with Sorin Antohi in 2005. Here Ricoeur stated that when he was
writing Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and Involuntary (1966):
I had concluded my book with the idea of assenting to finitude. I was an avid reader of
Rilke and I ended with the verse: Hier sein ist herrlich: being here is sumptuous, wonder-
ful, magical. Now, in my old age with the proximity of death, I repeat again: hier sein ist
herrlich. (Antohi, 2005: 20)
He had then continued this affirmation of life with the advice not to be submerged
in what Spinoza termed sad passions but to live, animated by what Descartes had
nominated as the first of the passions: wonder the capacity to be astonished (Antohi,
2005: 21).
While Ricoeur has admitted that there is a definite strain of mortality informing much
of his work, there is also manifest, at the same time, a vibrant and passionate involve-
ment with matters of this world. This engagement is unsparing in the integrity of its
Corresponding author:
Morny Joy, Department of Religious Studies, University of Calgary, Calgary T2N 1N4, Canada
Email: mjoy@ucalgary.ca
Philosophy and Social Criticism
37(2) 249253
The Author(s) 2011
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DOI: 10.1177/0191453710387077
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search for ways to understand and define vital issues such as those of identity, mutual
recognition and ways to live well with others in a just society.
My own reflections on the theme of life and mortality, as they resonate with Ricoeurs
final work, Living up to Death (2009), are supplemented in this presentation by certain
observations that he had made earlier on death and immortality. These can be found in a
series of interviews he undertook with Francois Azouvi and Marc de Launay that were
published in English in Critique and Conviction (1998). Here he states: My own expe-
rience of the end of life is nourished by this deepest wish to make the act of dying an act
of life (1998: 156). In affirming life until the moment of death, Ricoeur adopts an atti-
tude of detachment that includes mourning for the abandonment of any concern for an
afterlife (ibid.).
Ricoeurs attitude in this ascetic exercise of detachment is informed both by Meister
Eckharts notion of Gelassenheit (detachment) and Freuds understanding of the work
of mourning (1998: 152). As Ricoeur himself has explained elsewhere: Mourning, Freud
tells us, is a step-by-step letting go of all the attachments, cathexes and investments that
make us feel the loss of a beloved object as a loss of our own very self (1995: 25960).
He applies this demanding exercise not only to the notion of immortality or personal
resurrection but also to the notion of the self that aspires to attain such a state.
Such an undertaking involves first a bracketing-off of any imaginary projections of
an afterlife. Ricoeur expands: I therefore project not an afterdeath but a death that
would be an ultimate affirmation of life . . . what is important is to be living until the
moment of death (1998: 156). At the same time, while he allows that he will continue
to defend the idea of a self especially in its reflexive mode of ipse (1991: 1912)
against those who propose its demise, he nonetheless appreciates that, for him, as death
approaches, the query: Who am I?, loses much of its urgency. In addition to this pre-
occupation, the related demands of insistence and obsession are also nominated as
candidates for renunciation. There is indeed something close to a Buddhist austerity
at work here, and it is not by chance that, in his later writings, Ricoeur refers to certain
Buddhist ideals such as selfless dispossession in the disciplining of the passions as
part of the path to wisdom.
Yet Ricoeur does not want to convey the impression that this undertaking is one of
relentless gloom and doom. He continues by remarking that, in order not to be subject
to the reproach that Christianity tends to inculcate a culture of suffering: I have to con-
clude within this work of mourning the assurance that joy is still possible when every-
thing has been given up (1998: 157). As he also remarks a little later in the volume:
I try to join a certain gaiety to the work of mourning. Yes, I would like someone one
day to say of me: he was a very lively fellow, and not just a stern professor (ibid.: 162).
This statement reinforces the life-promoting orientation Ricoeur had expressed
toward the end of The Voluntary and the Involuntary where he first mentioned Hier sein
ist herrlich. In this more recent context, he describes how, in the concluding section of
that early work, he quoted Rilke to celebrate life in the face of death and suffering:
Thus I do not say that this is the best of all possible worlds but that this unique world,
uniquely for me, this incomparable world is good with a goodness which itself knows no
degrees, with a goodness which is the yes of being. (Ricoeur, 1966: 475)
250 Philosophy and Social Criticism 37(2)
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As he relates, in reminiscing about this reference where he was distinguishing between
the voluntary and involuntary aspects of existence: I had not wanted to be crushed by the
problem of death: I wanted in this way to give its rightful place to the theme of birth
(1998: 934).
Still later in this volume of interviews, Ricoeur will make a very telling self-
disclosure, that I will quote in full both because I find it extraordinary, and because
it is also a form of an apologia pro sua vita.
I hope so for myself when, confronting death, the veils of this language, its limitations and
codifications, are erased, in order to let something fundamental express itself, which per-
haps then, effectively, belongs to the order of experience. Life in the face of death, takes
on a capital L, and this is the courage of being alive up until death. I think, however, that
these experiences are rare, perhaps similar to those lived by the mystics. I have no experi-
ence in this sense. I have instead been attentive to the interpretation of texts, to the ethical
interpretation, even if, beyond the duty and even the desire to live well, I readily confess
that there is a call to love that comes from farther and from higher. (1998: 1456)
It is in this same book of interviews that Ricoeur also recounts how, with a certain sense
of amazement, he discovered the words of Hannah Arendt, quoting the Gospels which
themselves quote Isaiah 9:6: A child has been born to us (1998: 157). His comment
on this finding reveals his delight at discerning a kindred spirit who also affirmed life in
this world. For her, too, birth signifies more than death. This is what wishing to remain
living until death means (ibid.).
Arendt herself would understand this special disposition as promoting the ideal of
natality a term that is also redolent not only of birth, but also of beginnings, of gen-
erativity and of all initiatory endeavours. Inherent in her own affirmation is the under-
standing that men, though they must die, are not born in order to die, but in order to
begin (Arendt, 1959: 222).
1
The creation of human beings male and female he created them as Arendt often
insists, is a miracle, a gift. It witnesses to the munificence of this world, of being, of
human existence. At the same time, however, Arendt was only too aware of the fragility
of human life and its institutions. This is not the place to detail Arendts own philosophy
of action and its relation in the public world to freedom as her own attempt to protect
such fragility. Suffice it to say that in Arendts work, The Human Condition (1959) is
basically a lament for the steady erosion since Plato by way principally of Augustine,
medieval Christianity, Descartes, Kierkegaard and Heidegger whereby she believes
philosophy lost its way. Initially it did this by becoming focused on another, immortal
world, then by retreating into ever remoter explorations of interior worlds, and/or a pre-
occupation with death. Thus a vital connection to this world in its fullness of life was
severed. As Arendt comments on recent developments:
This new serious engagement with life that uses death as a point of departure does not,
however, necessarily imply an affirmation of life or of human existence as such. . . .
Kierkegaard and Heidegger after him have always interpreted death as the incontrovertible
objection to mans Being, Kierkegaards as the proof of mans nothingness. And in this
Joy 251
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Heideggers analysis of death may well exceed Kierkegaards in its force and precision.
(Arendt, 1994: 174)
From Arendts perspective this moribund negative focus in both its secular and
religious varieties has set humanity on a dangerous course because, as she observes:
if left to themselves, human affairs can only follow the law of mortality, which is the
most certain and only reliable law of a life spent between birth and death (1994: 222).
The work of both Ricoeur and Arendt thus issues a challenge to such a negative depic-
tion of human life. In their respective lives and writing, they bear witness to an affirma-
tion of life and a love of this world that defies any easy capitulation to death.
Conclusion
My final words will return to Ricoeur and his explorations in relation to the notion of
personal resurrection now that he has abandoned any personal attachment to this
idea. He speculates at various stages about the ways that Hegel, Hans Jonas and White-
head (1998: 158) have attempted to portray a way that life can live on in some form
after death that does not involve conventional appeals to other worlds. In this short tri-
bute, however, I will just present one modality that I think is the most appropriate for
this particular setting. Ricoeur appealed a number of times to the living community
who would survive him to continue his own aspirations. He declares: I cast upon oth-
ers, my survivors, the task of taking up again my desire to be, my effort to exist, in the
time of the living (ibid.).
In my view this is exactly what is happening here at this conference as we gather
together to celebrate Ricoeurs life and work. In this way we help him to continue to
participate, in that future-perfect tense that he had proposed, during his life, when he
imagined how he could be the survivor of my own death (1998: 159).
Notes
1. Arendt adapts Augustines Initium ergo ut esset, creatus est homo, ante quem, nullus fuit
(That there should be a beginning, man was created before whom there was nobody), as sup-
portive of her position. (Augustine, De civitate Dei xii.20).
Bibliography
Antohi, Sorin (2005) Memory, History, Forgiveness: a Dialogue between Paul Ricoeur and Sorin
Antohi, Janus Head 8(1): 1425.
Arendt, Hannah (1959) The Human Condition. New York: Doubleday.
Arendt, Hannah (1994) Essays in Understanding. New York: Harcourt, Brace.
Ricoeur, Paul (1966[1950]) Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary, trans. E. V.
Kohak. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Ricoeur, Paul (1991) Narrative Identity, in On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation, ed.
David Wood, trans. D. Wood. London: Routledge, pp. 1889.
Ricoeur, Paul (1995) Evil: a Challenge to Philosophy and Theology, in Figuring the Sacred:
Religion, Narrative, Imagination, ed. M. I. Wallace, trans. D. Pellauer. Minneapolis, MN:
Fortress Press, pp. 24961.
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Ricoeur, Paul (1998[1995]) Critique and Conviction: Conversations with Francois Azouvi and
Marc de Launay, trans. K. Blamey. New York: Columbia University Press.
Ricoeur, Paul (2009[2007]) Living up to Death, trans. D. Pellauer. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press.
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