Editor's Introduction

Since the last decade of the twentieth century, there has been talk of a return of the religious in Western societies, the very ones that sociologists in the 1960s considered to be entering into an inescapable process of secularization. The evidence is contradictory, for the influence of religious institutions on society and personal practices continues to fall, while at the same time we are witnessing a revival of religious identities and demands in the public space. Spanning fifty years, Ricoeur's philosophical work is contemporaneous with this movement of secularization in Western societies, but also with this, at the very least equivocal, "return" of the religious. His work itself complicates all the schemata, all the simplistic explanations by being neither religious nor detached from religion. Indeed, if Ricoeur did not wish to apply the term of Christian philosopher to his work - this cannot be overemphasized - he did on occasion call himself a "Protestant philosopher";1 above all, he never concealed the Christian inspiration of several themes in his thought. Some vigorously reproached him for this, others were pleased by it: a contradictory reception, which confirms that both sides sought first to justify themselves, in other words, to vindicate their personal position with respect to religion. Religion, like politics, belongs to those domains where study teaches us as much about the subjects of the investigation as about the object itself.

In these circumstances, the concern with personal positioning can form a barrier to a good understanding of Ricoeur's work with respect to religion, for those who condemn this reference to Christian tradition just as those who approve it have not always taken just measure of the very specific relation binding his philosophy to religion. Beginning in the 1940s, as a young philosopher in the school of Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973) and Karl Jaspers (1883-1969), Paul Ricoeur attempted to trace a via media between the philosophical recognition of a revealed truth - readily recognized by the former - and the claim to encompass in one's vision all religions, for which he reproached the latter, who (like Don Juan) embraces all myths without adhering to any of them. The fact that he did not recognize himself as a Christian philosopher did not prevent Ricoeur from maintaining that one cannot think of religion except on the basis of a religion, which for him is the Judeo-Christian religion tracing its roots to the Bible - the philosopher, from the outset, turning his back on classical metaphysics, following Emmanuel Kant (1724-1804) in this, but also Karl Barth (1886-1968), in particular by giving up any investigation into the so-called "proofs" of the existence of God.

Early on, this religion appeared to the philosopher as an injunction to reflect on the will. From the time of The Voluntary and the Involuntary, his doctoral dissertation in 1950, he put into parenthesis - performing a phenomenological epoche - the transcendent God named in biblical texts, in order better to describe the will as the fundamental possibility of the human being, in connection with the involuntary, which followed the voluntary like its shadow.2 Neither God nor moral failure was to interfere, therefore, in the study of the reciprocity of the voluntary and the involuntary, even if from the very start the philosopher referred laterally (but firmly) to Edenic innocence as the reality that the evil will had made inaccessible, without, however, obliterating it. In Ricoeur's eyes, evil is what should not exist, so that the fault is the absurd par excellence: an act lacking necessity. Already in the introduction to The Voluntary and the Involuntary, the philosopher announced that a Poetics of Freedom (never written) would conclude The Philosophy of the Will. It was to have opened the parenthesis and brought Transcendence into appearance as that which regenerates the servile will. And Ricoeur asks: "Might not the philosopher take exception to introducing the absurd on the pretext that it is dictated by a Christian theology of original sin? Yet if theology opens our eyes to an obscure segment of human reality, no methodological a priori should prevent the philosopher from having his eyes opened and henceforth reading man, his history and civilization, under the sign of the fall."3 A profound question, which would be deepened ten years later in Fallible Man and The Symbolism of Evil (books 1 and 2 of Finitude and Guilt). The philosopher designates hermeneutics here, more precisely, as the philosophical method that will enable his thought to encompass the figures of innocence and goodness offered to the imagination by the power of symbols and myths. It is here that Ricoeur recognized the "mythico-poetic function"4 understood as the power of the creative imagination which will be extended - with The Rule of Metaphor (1975) - to the entire field of poetic language. This, then, raises a difficulty in Ricoeur's philosophical approach to the religious: as strange as it may seem, it seeks to avoid the philosophical debate (notably in Anglo-Saxon philosophy) over the reality to which religious statements refer, by placing in parenthesis the question of their truth, even though these biblical texts - in fact - call upon a form of authority with respect to their readers. The trouble is, more precisely, that Ricoeur's approach considers religious language as one form of poetic language among others, all the while underscoring its function of liberation: this has to do with regenerating a will incapable of doing what is right, essentially a religious theme inherited from Kant as much as from the apostle Paul, and tirelessly meditated on by Ricoeur in his writings on religion.

From this, doubtless, springs a certain "equivocalness" in Ricoeur's work considered as a whole, which clashes in the post-war climate dominated by the figure of Sartre (1905-1980), where everyone was expected to declare obedience to the strict dividing line between those who believe in heaven and those who do not, to paraphrase Aragon. Don't think that Ricoeur didn't choose: he did, in his own way. After his dissertation, the writings in his capacity as professor of philosophy are clearly devoid of religious intention: none of the master works that would later confer upon him international recognition (The Rule of Metaphor, Time and Narrative, Oneself as Another, Memory, History, Forgetting) specifically concerns religion. The very word is absent from all the titles of his works, without exception. In fact, the philosophy of Ricoeur is not religious. But this has not prevented him from carrying thought to "the frontiers of philosophy"5 toward the religion that Ricoeur has always held - by virtue of a very Protestant habitus - to be the non-philosophical par excellence. What primarily defines religion for Ricoeur is, in fact, being the other of philosophy, placed under the sign of the dispossession of the self, the non-mastery of the subject. There is in his work no better definition of religion.6 He did not produce, moreover, any philosophy of religion, in the sense of a systematic philosophical undertaking entirely devoted to religion, as we find in Kant or Hegel (1770-1831). He did, of course, propose remarkable readings of the Kantian and Hegelian endeavors, but it has been the constancy with which Ricoeur has explored these frontiers of philosophy and religion over more than half a century of philosophical labor that has brought him recognition, all over the world, as one of the most important thinkers in the domain of religion.

Let us go back to the question of the "return of the religious." In what way might Ricoeur's work shed light on our current situation, in which contradictory signs are seen to coexist, at once a retreat from and a return of the religious in constant mutation? In the fact that his work distinguished - without, however, explicitly thematizing this - two types of relation to the religious which it itself practiced, referring to two possible modes of laïcité, perhaps a typically French notion, inherited from the conflictual history of religion in France. We have to go back here to the 1950s to see that a process of "laïcisation" was undertaken very early on in Ricoeur's philosophy.7 Already in 1952, when he presided over the Protestant Federation of Instruction, the philosopher was seeking "a laïcité that was neither anti-religious, nor for all that skeptical or abstentionist."8 He was calling more specifically for distinguishing a "laïcité of abstention," which is that of the State and public education, from a "laïcité of confrontation," which, in civil society, allows convictions to be expressed in a space of open discussion. Over forty years later, in Critique and Conviction (1995), Ricoeur reaffirmed this distinction between the two faces of "laïcité" coexisting in modern society. He called once more for the recognition, alongside state laïcité, of the existence of an "active,...