Narrative identity, Hermeneutics and Ethics
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| Year of publication | 2019 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The aim of this paper was to point out the impact of Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy on explorations of narrative identity and to discuss some of Ricoeur’s less well-known ideas about identity in relation to recent developments in the world. Ricoeur’s reflections on narrative identity are innovative, among other reasons, for their overlaps with ethics; they can serve as a heuristic tool to analyze various forms of political and ideological manipulation. Ricoeur introduced his notion of narrative identity in Oneself as Another (1990) and developed it further in his following texts (e.g. Memory, History, Forgetting, 2004) by linking it with memory and ethics. He views narrative identity as fragile not only with regard to time, but also in connection with the other, alterity, and otherness. The other or otherness can be perceived as a threat to one’s own identity, leading to the development of various defence strategies on both the individual and the social level, such as rejection, exclusion, or creating enemies. Ricoeur analyses these mechanisms also with regard to ideology and history, and he explains how ideologies work with stories and how they use stories as a means of manipulation. My paper demonstrated the pertinence of Ricoeur’s concepts to our current times by applying it to the political situation in Central Europe, especially to the anti-immigrant rhetoric of certain politicians. |
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