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II. Violence in the sphere of ethics and moral.

Before setting about the specifications violence acquires in the ethical and moral

dimension, we must be clear on the fact that by convention, for Ricoeur both terms are not

exchangeable. They both acquire a technical character. While by ethics the author means

the aim of an accomplished life,11 morality points to the articulation of this aim in norms

characterized at once by the claim to universality and by an effect of constraint.12 This

convention clears up immediately when Ricoeur links ethics to the Aristotelian teleological

legacy and morality to Kantian deontological tradition.13

Far from supporting strict orthodoxy, Agustn Moratalla is right in claiming that his

teleologism is, at the same time and indissolubly, deontologism.14 A moral deontologism

which is subordinated to the ethical aim of the good life, but which operates as its essential

complement.

Where does this need for an ethical goal crossed by the Kantian idea of norm, of moral

law, derive from? It is precisely here that Ricoeur replies that the very fact of violenceconstitutes the primary circumstance in the transition from a teleological to a deontological

point of view.15 What is to be perceived as violence in so much as to require good life

the goal of the teleological level to be subjected to the level of the dutiful, the

obligatory mainstay of the deontological level? It is here that Ricoeurs debt to Hannah

Arendt, who states Violence [] is distinguished by its instrumental character,16 becomes

apparent. As John Wall explains, also in this context Violence is meant [for Ricoeur] as a

broad term referring to any practice in which persons are instrumentalized for an alien or

fragmenting teleological purpose.17 It is in the face of this thread of instrumentalism whose

possibility of manifestation come to surface in the teleological level where not only

cooperation but also confrontation situations may arise that due respect to people is raised

as stated in the second formulation of the Kantian categorical imperative. Let us recall it: Actin such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of

another, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end.18 The aim

of this passage through morality that ethics undertakes qualified at this instance as naive

is to establish reciprocity on the very space where just by resorting to this ethics all figures of

violence are bound to be triggered. As a matter of fact, in this first level of ethics, and given

that every interaction may bear a basic dissimetry between the power exerted by one willover

another, we would be exposed, Ricoeur claims, from theft, rape, psychological cruelty,

deception, etc. to exploitation, torture and homicide.

But for Ricoeur Kantian morality does not substitute Aristotelian ethics because

according to the universal idea of humanity, present in the second formulation of the

categorical imperative, otherness states the author is prevented from deploying itself bythe universality that encircles it.19 That is, the Kantian turn around the engulfing idea of

humanity hinders opening to intersubjectivity to otherness, in short, to the plurality of

people accounted for by Arendt in The human condition.20

This intrinsic difficulty of Kantian norms turns morality into a mere instance of limited

effectuation, which ought to be perfected through the final recourse of morality to ethics.21

It is this final recourse of deontological morality to teleological ethics now turned into

critical ethics that would guarantee the recognition of positive values belonging to the

historical and communitarian contexts of the realization of these same rules.22

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The author thus faces the antagonism between the universalist and contextualist

theoretical position, related to the search for a philosophical foundation ofhuman rights. It is

in this area that Ricoeur ventures on a sort of practical mediation to be in charge of

overcoming the antinomy between universalism and contextualism, which the current debate

on human rights keeps oscillating between.23 This practical mediation is entrusted to the

Aristotelian labour ofphronesis, taken here as the practical wisdom ofmoral judgement in

situation.

III. Violence in the political sphere. The perpendicular structure of politics.

In Oneself as AnotherRicoeur states, on one hand, that our problem is not to add a

political philosophy to moral philosophy24 so much so that he claims the following:

[Hegelian] Sittlichkeit would then no longer denote a third agency, higher than

ethics and morality, but would designate one of the places in which practical

wisdom is exercised, namely, the hierarchy of institutional mediations.25

On the other hand, he then confesses:

Hegel's philosophical project in thePhilosophy of Rightremains very close to my own

views, to the extent that it reinforces the claims directed against political atomism []. To

this extent, [] the notion of Sittlichkeit[] has never ceased to instruct us.26

But then, such as we anticipated in the Introduction, Ricoeur had held that the political

extended ethics by assigning it a field of exercise, the state thus becoming the realization of

the ethical intention in the political sphere. Likewise, many years before he had endorsed Eric

Weil's statement that Political Philosophy is the very movement coming from morality,engulfing it as a starting point and overcoming it in a theory of the state.27 We should,

therefore, come to the conclusion that, granted there are in fact elements for a theory of state

in Ricoeur's work, there is also, in consequence, an overcoming of ethics and morality

towards an, at least, inchoative political philosophy.

What we should ask ourselves is what Ricoeur understands state to mean. At this

point he upholds Weil's formula that the state is the organization of a historical community;

organized as state, the community is capable of making decisions.28 Leaving aside the

richness this definition entails, Ricoeur is clear in advocating that Weil's formulation focuses

on the rational form when it comes to defining the state. This rational form highlights what

the author calls the horizontal tie of wishing to live together.29 This horizontality is

immediately set in terms of equation with Arendt's formula to definepoweras the humanability not just to act but to act in concert .30

Nonetheless, Ricoeur thinks there is more to Weil's formula than to Arendt's claims.

Arendt contested Max Weber's well-known definition: the state is the form of human

community that (successfully) lays claim to the monopoly of the legitimate physical violence

within a particular territory.31. Before this definition, Arendt replies that Power and violence

are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent.32 Weil's advantage

regarding Arendt's position consists of the incorporation of a voluntarist dimension of the

state, absent in Arendt. This is the reason why Ricoeur assigns the state a perpendicular

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In the previous section we made a mere marginal reference to the concept of founding

violence whereby Ricoeur understands basically conquest, usurpation, forced marriage or

warlike feats of conquerors. This topic is taken over in La lectura del tiempo pasado:

memoria y olvido (1999) [The Reading of the Past: Memory and Forgetting]. On approaching

the figure of the wounded memory, Ricoeur observes that one of the sources of

vulnerability is the place of violence in the founding of identities, mainly collective

identity.45 After associating collective memory, as well as history, with violence and after

agreeing with Hobbes in founding political philosophy on violence,46 Ricoeur states the

following: there is no historical community that has not arisen out of what can be termed an

original relation to war.47

These epoch-making events of a community and its members identity awareness,

constitute in turn a tremendum fascinosum, whose counterpart, the tremendum horrendum, the

author had already anticipated in Time and Narrative, Vol 3 (1985) because loathing is the

negative form of veneration.48Horror concludes Ricoeur is inverted veneration.49 To the

extent that history ethical neutralization is neither possible nor desirable in these epoch-making events. This founding violence, where the glory and admiration of some is the

obverse side of the horror and humiliation of others, is a compelling reason for Ricoeur to

propose the fictionalization of history in this work. Before the unhappy pretence of the

assessment neutrality of historical knowledge, the author claims that fiction gives eyes to

the horrified narrator. Eyes to see and to weep.50 Fiction, the same as the metaphorical trope

Ricoeur examined in The Rule of Metaphor (1975), introduces events in the sensitive,

intuitive and vivid form of the image; and in this fashion block the way of the elusive

character of the pastness of the past51 of those violent events that must never be forgotten.52

InMemory,History,Forgetting(2000), this wounded memory finds its parallel in the

imposed forgetting. In front of political disorder experienced as a threat to social peace,

amnesty is depicted as the suspension of violence. But Ricoeur points out that because of thisdisruption amnesty implies institutional forgetting, touches the very roots of the political,

and, through it, the most profound and most deeply concealed relation to a past that is placed

under an interdiction53. Therefore, if ethical neutralization contributes, as we have seen, to

denying the memory of founding violence, amnesty keeps a phonetic and semantic affinity

with the amnesia imposed in relation to the crimes committed during periods of seditious

violence.

Now then, Ricoeur thinks that whereas amnesty seeks reconciliation and civil peace, its

proximity to amnesia through the imposed forgetting intercepts the dialectics of seditious

violence and forgiveness. Forgiveness that must not be obliging, lenient or indulgent if it

tries to contribute to the healing of the wounded memory.54 In short: it must be a difficult

forgiveness. For Ricoeur, this difficult forgiveness, far away from the imposedforgetting dictated by amnesty, implies some active forgetting capable of establishing a

subtle borderline between amnesia and infinite debt.55 In all: difficult forgiveness would

imply a certain act of faith set between imposed forgetting and infinite debt which could

be read as a credit we give to past violence to avoid its recurrence in the future.

V. Conclusion

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As anticipated in the Introduction, we will conclude this paper with a brief assessment

of the achievements and partially unresolved matters around violence as presented in Ricoeur

s work.

First, within its merits stands a serious attempt at mediating in the realms of morality

and ethics, between universalist claims and community limitations affecting the philosophical

principle of human rights, through his proposal of the universals in context. Among the

unresolved topics lies the evasive character of these inchoative universals. Ricoeur s

intention of reconciling Aristotelian phronesis with Hegelian Sittlichkeit through Kantian

Moralitt,56 can be challenged following Martha Nussbaum as she questioned him as follows:

What is the lesson taught us by the plays concluding appeal to practical wisdom

(tophronein)? How can there be good deliberation in a situation in which all the

altermatives involve doing violence to an important value?57

Especially when Nussbaum herself reminds us that The first thing that tragic phronein

shows us, for Ricoeur as for Hegel, is the one-sidedness or partiality of the competingprinciples.58

Second, it is worth noting the virtue behind Ricoeurs position on avoiding the

unilaterality that Arendts and Webers proposals around the political and the state fall into.

Along this line of thought, his lack of qualms about standing for an ortogonal or perpendicular

structure for the political and the state in which the rational form of living with or co-

action is crossed by the irrational thorn of the legitimate forceproves plausible. And if it

proves plausible, it is because its program cannot be unilaterally associated with either

conservative fundamentalism or radical political left wing. Among some unfinished matters,

in his early works lies the aspiration of articulating a political philosophy whose effectuation

is set aside in his late production, in an enigmatic, incomprehensible way. All the more

incomprehensible when he, at times, comes to the point of urging us to make use of legitimatestate violence to put an end to violence once and for all.59

Finally, it is noteworthy how original he is in stating the fictionalization of history as an

iconic device capable of preventing historical communities from forgetting founding

violence, that is, forgetting that foundational violence eventually legitimized by the

respective states of law. This fictionalization also operates as a solution to restore politics, not

at the expense of seditious violence amnesty-amnesia or imposed forgetting, but through

difficult forgiveness. Among the drawbacks, the attempt at explaining difficult

forgiveness, regarded as an act of faith, within a supra-ethics Ricoeur associates with

economy of the gift. An economy characterized by the victory of the logic of

superabundance over the logic of equivalence or the reciprocity characteristic of daily

ethics.

60

Bringing difficult forgiveness closer to the economy of the gift turns the formerinto a super erogatory or samaritan act, unconditionality ending up as its attribute.61 We

believe this poetics of love (agape) Ricoeur inscribes difficult forgiveness in should open

further up to the language of justice.62 In that sense, we consider Tzvetan Todorov's idea of

bringing exemplary memory together with justice a better way to restore politics through

hard forgiveness.63 Thus, facing the unconditionality of forgiveness, we believe that

conditioning difficult forgiveness to comparison, analogy and generalization inherent

instances in Todorov's notion of exemplary memory would better guarantee that when it

comes to forgiving we have in fact learnt from the past. Especially when, ultimately, it is all

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about learning how to root out the multiple and multiform faces violence strikes us with

throughout time.

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1 Translated from Spanish to English by Mara Viviana Matta.2 See Coady, C.A.J, Violence,Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Version: 1.0, London.3 Max Weber incarnate this legitimism. See Max WeberPolitical Writings, ed. by Peter Lasssman

and Ronald Speiers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.4 See Galtung, J., Violence, Peace and Peace Research, inJournal of Peace Research, 1969, Vol. 6 n.

2, pp. 167-191; id. Cultural Violence, inJournal of Peace Research, 1990, Vol. 27 n. 3, pp. 291-305.5

Ricoeur, Paul, The Political Paradox, in Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth, Trans. Charles A.Kelbley. Evanston: Northwestern University press. 1965, 247-70.6 Ricoeur, Paul, Ethics and politics, in Paul Ricoeur, FromText to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II,

Trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson. Evanston: Northwestern University Press,7 Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself as Another,Trans. Kathleen Blamey, The University of Chicago Press, 1992.8 See Ricoeur, Paul, Ethics and politics.9 Ibid.10 V. Ricoeur, Paul, The Just, Trans. David Pellauer, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and

London, 2000.11 Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself, p.170.12 Ibid.13 Ibid.14 Moratalla, Agustn Domingo, Introduction, in Ricoeur, Paul, Lo justo, Spanish Trans. Agustn

Domingo Moratalla, Caparrs Editores, Madrid, 1999, p. 13.15 Ricoeur, Paul, The Just, p. xvii16 Arendt, Hannah, On violence, Harcourt, Brace, 1969. p. 48.17 Wall, John, Moral Meaning. Beyond the Good and the Right, in John Wall, William Shweiker, andDavid Hall (eds.),Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought, London, Routledge, 2002, p. 53.18 Kant, Immanuel, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, Trans. James W. Ellington), Hackett,

1993. p. 36.19 Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself, p 22620 See Arendt, Hannah, The human condition, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1958, p. 8.21 Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself, p 17122 Ibid. p. 27423 Ibid.24 Ibid., p. 250.25 Ibid.26 Ibid., pp. 25455.27 Ricoeur, Paul, La philosophe politique d'Eric Weil, in Paul Ricoeur, Lectures 1 - Autour du

politique. Paris, Seuil, 1991, p. 96.28 Eric Weil,La philosophie politique, Paris, Vrin, 1984, 131, cited in Ricoeur, Ethics and Politics, p.

330.29 Paul Ricoeur, Critique and conviction: conversations with Franois Azouvi and Marc de Launay,

Trans Polity Press, Columbia Univerity, 1998, p. 99.30 Arendt, Hannah, On Violence, p. 4631 Max Weber, The Profession and Vocation of Politics, in Max Weber, Political Writings, ed. by

Peter Lasssman and Ronald Speiers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 310-11.32 Arendt, Hannah, On Violence, p. 70.33 Paul Ricoeur, Critique and conviction, p. 98.34 Ricoeur, Paul, The Course of Recognition, Trans. David Pellauer, Harvard College, 2005, p. 212.35 Violence which in this work is attenuated when called right to command.36 Ibid.37 Ibid.


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38See Ricoeur, Paul, State and Violence, in Paul Ricoeur,History.... 234-46.39 Ibid.40 Ricoeur, Paul, Pouvoir et violence, in Paul Ricoeur,Lectures 1, pp. 20-42.41 See Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method, Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall,London: Sheed & Ward, 1996.42 See Ricoeur, Paul, Les paradoxes de lautorit, in Philosophie, Bulletin de Liaison des professeurs

de philosophie de lacadmie de Versailles, C.R.D.P. , n 7, fvrier 1995.43 Ricoeur, Paul, Pouvoir et, p. 40.44 Ibid.45 Ricoeur, Paul,La lectura del tiempo pasado: memoria y olvido, Spanish Trans. Gabriel Aranazueque,Madrid, Arrecife, 1999, p. 31.46 Ricoeur says: Hobbes was not wrong in making political philosophy arise out of an original situation

in which fear of violent death pushes man out of the state of nature into the bonds of a contractualpact, that, first of of all, guarantees him security, ibid., p. 32.

47 Ibid. p. 82.48 See Ricoeur, Paul, Time and Narrative. Vol 3, Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer, The

University of Chicago Press, 1988.49 Ibid. p. 18850 Ibid.51 Ibid. p. 19052 Ibid. p. 18753 Ricoeur, Paul, Memory, History, Forgetting, Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer), The

University of Chicago Press, 2004. p. 453.54 While obliging pardon would extend the evasive forgetting, benevolent pardon would look for

impunity, and indulgentpardon would erase the column of debts magically, carrying out the paper of

deep forgetting. See Ricoeur, Paul,La lectura...., pp. 62-65.55 See ibid.56Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself, p. 290.57 Nussbaum, Martha C. Ricoeur on Tragedy. Teleology, Deontology, andPhronesis, in John Wall,

William Shweiker, and David Hall (eds.),Paul Ricoeur, p. 272.58 Ibid.59 Ricoeur says that If one day the state must decline, why do we not use its violence one more time?

How can we resist the temptation of a violence which would put an end with violence at once andforever? Death to traitors!, we shouted, but violence is again of its ashes Ricoeur, Paul, El filsofo

y el poltico ante la cuestin de la libertad, in id. Sociedad, poltica e historicidad, Spanish Trans. N.

Corona, R. Garca y M. Prelooker, Buenos Aires, Docencia, 1986, p. 191.60 V. Ricoeur, Paul, Amor y justicia, in id. Amor y justicia, Spanish Trans. Toms Domingo

Moratalla, Caparrs Editores, Madrid, 1993, pp. 13-34.61 See Ricoeur, Paul,Memory, History62 From The Course of Recognition it is clear that while agape is expression of generosity, justice is ruleof equivalence.63 See Todorov, Zvetan, The Uses and Abuses of Memory, in Howard Marchitello (ed.), What

Happens to History: The Renewal of Ethics in Contemporary Thought, Nueva York: Routledge, 2001.Todorov basically confronts two modalities of memory: literal memory and exemplary memory.

Whereas literal memory runs the risk of repressing the present under the past, exemplary memory

implies the use of past events as a model for understanding new situations, working the past as anaction principle for the present and the future.

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The human condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.

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Galtung, J.,

Violence, Peace and Peace Research, inJournal of Peace Research, 1969, Vol. 6 n. 2, pp. 167-191;

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