Keywords

4.1 Colonialism’s Legacy in the Muslim World

Ricœur was highly successful in his anticolonial work, using discussion and debate with students to further the cause, as well as publishing articles. By reviewing the history of this period in his life we see clearly his success in using discussion to effect change. In his essay Universal Civilisation and National Cultures, Ricœur commented on the worldwide hegemony of European culture underpinned by the imposition of the nation state’s colonial administration and physical force:

No one can say what will become of our civilisation when it has rarely met different civilisations by means other than domination and conquest. (Ricœur 1964, 277)

He was critical of Europeans’ ability to dominate places far afield that consequently found their own culture and collective personality weakened and colonised by the West. He addressed this both academically and practically by showing how the colonised needed to reassert their own personalities in order to shake off the colonial personality imposed upon them:

The fight against colonial powers and the struggles for liberation were, to be sure, only carried through by laying claim to a separate personality; for these struggles were not only incited by economic exploitation but more fundamentally by the substitution of personality that the colonial era had given rise to. (Ricœur 1964, 277)

This resonates with Wael Hallaq’s description of the fatal weakening of Shari’aFootnote 1 by western culture imposed by a dominating personality type using physical powers. Like Ricœur, Hallaq is profoundly sceptical about the nation state (Hallaq 2013). Both advocate the community as a moral and viable grouping. Ricœur had much to say about the cruelty of colonialism where the nation state encourages the privileged self to oppress the less privileged self. The binary here is the person and the other, the coloniser and the colonised, both of whom are situated in specific places and times: in Ricœur’s case, France and Algeria in the 1950s.

Taking colonial issues as the thematic case study for this chapter, I will show how Ricœur used existentialist and phenomenological methods (see Sect. 4.3) to challenge French colonialism in Algeria, by means, respectively, of affiliation with mass student protest and careful personal analysis of the abuse of power. His early work in particular, and his engagement with structuralism are also instructive.

In order to tentatively frame the generalized societal animosity towards Islam, I begin by juxtaposing colonialism with what it destroyed in Muslim cultures, which were often Shari’a-grounded community-rooted and community-driven societies. Shari’a, in contrast to colonial domination by administration and physical force, is based upon revelation, and therefore ‘persistent[ly] attempts to locate itself in a particular moral cosmology’. In this ontology, the moral-legal cultures of non-Muslims were respected and upheld, and they had recourse to their own courts to settle their affairs. In such a world, contra European colonialism, the objective was not to ‘render them subservient to colonial economic and commercial imperatives’, so there was no need for the ‘generally violent break-up of the native social and political systems […] essential to relieving the colonies of their wealth’; rather, ‘the Shari’a, by the constitution of its fiqhFootnote 2 (as well as by its actual socioeconomic history), neither promoted economic classes nor encouraged capitalistic or class dominance’ (Hallaq 2009, Chap. 13). By contrast, European colonialists imported the nation state to colonised territories to systemically and systematically control ‘both the social order and the national citizen […by] engag[ing] in systemic surveillance, disciplining and punishment [and via] its educational and cultural institutions’ thereby converting the Muslim believer into the good colonial servant who could be economically exploited as much as possible (Hallaq 2009, Chap. 13). Yet today, the topic of Shari’a can conjure up extreme forms of punishment such as used by some Taliban groups, rather than Hallaq’s practical and accommodating pre-nation state depiction.

Shari’a’s historically actioned, community-rooted, anti-exploitative idealism offers a refreshing localism that many people would find attractive; as Hallaq explains:

internal, indigenous considerations of the community as the central domain of the moral would be the ultimate basis on which an evincive theory of antiuniversalism might be constructed, a theory that advocates the uniqueness of world societies but that also must summon up the intellectual stamina needed to provide a persuasive antidote to the dominating liberal concept of universalism. (Hallaq 2013: 168)

Fresh scholarship can release us from such dichotomous arguments (antiuniversalism versus liberalism), as in Scharbrodt’s work on Muhammad Abduh as a scholar at ease with ambiguity and complexity as well as with decisive legal rulings (Scharbrodt 2022). Thus we could learn from Shari’a to reverse various postcolonial trends visible now, such as the urgent need to support small scale local government and local networks rather than centralizing control and funds and then starving the localities of finances. On this positive note, Vinding considers the potential for Shari’a to engage directly with state analysis and be an immanent agent for change (in Scandinavia specifically). However, he also indicates the complexity of this endeavor since Shari’a is mis/understood in such polarized ways that its meaning first needs to be clarified (Vinding 2022). As one instance of this, Fadel reminds us that Hallaq’s inversion of morality regards modernity as oppressive, not Shari’a, which creates a false binary and may even preclude healthy critique (Fadel 2011: 123). Indeed, as Moosa points out, Islamic legal traditions can under certain circumstances make it impossible to countenance changes occasioned by human circumstances in case the belief system could lose its identity (Moosa 2009: 164–65).

4.2 Young Ricœur and Colonial Influence

Ricoeur avoided the prefix ‘post’ as in (for example) ‘postcolonial’ when possible, believing that most belief systems retained their identity and their problems even when apparently displaced. He experienced this throughout his long life. Born in 1913 and departing the world in 2005, European empire building, destruction and collapse of empire were significant themes throughout Ricœur’s life, which featured several pressure points: familial, faith related and both national and international. As a child, he was an orphan brought up by grandparents: he reported that he often misbehaved at school and that, when training for the army, he was considered ‘unruly’. By marrying into a family with anarcho-syndicalist connections, he became aware of socialism as a possible antidote to growing fascist tendencies after the First World War. As a young secondary school teacher, he was militant, taking part in the socialist youth movement, attending marches and supporting the socialist Popular Front. It seems unsurprising then that Ricœur became active in seeking freedom from colonialism for Algeria, despite being best known as a theoretical philosopher.

There are religious, international and political reasons for his sensitivity to power imbalances. At home, he was a Protestant family member of a minority religion in Catholic-heritage France. Internationally, in Ricœur’s childhood and young adulthood, the French colonial system was strong. For much of the Second World War he was held in a camp as a prisoner of war. After witnessing the collapse of Germany’s imperial ambitions, during his long life, he also witnessed the decline of other European imperial powers, particularly that of the French in Algeria. The hitherto dominant idea that western culture and white people are the bearers of superior civilisation was also coming under question.

Yet, at the time of writing (2022–3), we see that this idea of white supremacy still enjoys much currency, and it is met with both increasing challenge (such as the Black Lives Matter movement) and resentful reassertion from powerful groups (via a ‘culture war’ encouraged by state-affiliated interests that seek to deny issues such as racism and the need to decolonise the curriculum). Colonial injustices were of great concern to Ricœur decades ago, and this distinguishes him from many of his illustrious French forebears, including the political scientist de Tocqueville (1805–1859), who paid no attention to the French colonization of Algeria that took place in his lifetime, and Durkheim (1858–1917), the architect of modern sociology, who showed no interest in the French empire. Similarly, in Germany, Weber saw empire as a necessary adjunct to the nation state, and Marx, although critical of slavery, was intent upon analysing the cruelty of capitalist labour in the west. Indeed, since its inception the very discipline of sociology has, Bhambra and Holmwood argue in Colonialism and Modern Social Theory, remained negligent, willfully blind or dishonest about empire, colonialism, racism and slavery (Bhambra and Holmwood 2021). By contrast, in 1961 Ricœur wrote perceptively against the false belief that European and North American culture is superior to that of other continents, and rejected the hegemonic cultural mediocrity exported by the West:

Everywhere throughout the world one finds the same bad movie, the same slot machines, the same plastic or aluminium atrocities. (Ricœur 1964, 277)

Ricœur understood the failure of borders to be accurate markers of nations or languages, showing how the prime purpose of a state was impossible. He was highly critical of the nation-state: he saw the danger of the state and the nation becoming one unit, and understood how limiting the individual to national identity has the potential to nurture nationalistic and thence even xenophobic impulses. In Ricœur’s words:

There is no political distribution of borders which is adequate to the distribution of languages and cultures, so there is no political solution at the level of the nation-state. This is the real irritant of the 20th century, this dream of a perfect equation between nation and state. (Kearney 2004, 146)

Hallaq’s argument for the state’s impossibility is rooted in his concern for ‘ecological sustainability, along with moral and communal prosperity’ and his focus thus pertains to the unsustainability of modernity’s physical and human destructiveness (Anjum 2013, 134; Hallaq 2013). Here Hallaq recommends a dialectical method of resolution, as Ricoeur often did also:

This initial but sustained process is therefore dialectical, moving back and forth between the constructive efforts of community building and a discursive negotiation with—and of—the modern state and its liberal values, in both East and West. As we will see, insisting on the second component of this dialectic is as essential as the steadfastness with which the first component—the raison d’être of the entire project—is pursued. (Hallaq 2013: 168)

4.3 Ricœur’s Philosophical Toolkit

Ricœur used not only such dialectical methods, but all the intellectual tools at his disposal to deal with injustice. Let me begin by stating what some of these instruments are. Phenomenology can be described as the study of our ability to perceive the world around us, and use that insight to understand ourselves better. Existentialism took several action-based forms, including the socialism of Jean-Paul Sartre (d. 1980), for whom existentialism was an ideology-based attempt to carry out ideologically sound actions (Scott-Baumann 2022, 292–305). There was also a kind of existentialism in the positive approach to societal improvement and personal interdependence of Gabriel Marcel (d. 1973) with whom Ricœur agreed more than he did with Sartre. Existentialism came to seem highly subjective and was displaced in the 1950s by structuralism, a very successful attempt to replace the subject’s viewpoint (yours and mine) and personal responsibility with structures and coded analysis of language. Ricœur found structuralism useful for analysing language, but limiting if applied as a system for understanding the world. Hermeneutics influenced him later with its transformative focus upon linguistic interpretation (see Chaps. 5 and 6). Another approach that was available but not used by Ricœur was Islam, which, according to Malise Ruthven, ‘is above all the religion of justice’ (1984, cited in Rosen 1999, 154). (I note this in my determination to bring the ‘other’, the Muslim, into this discussion in a Ricœurian way.) Ovamir Anjum juxtaposes this quintessential feature of justice against the current might-is-right ‘theology of domination’ that has taken root in the Muslim world in the wake of colonialismFootnote 3; to compound the tragic irony, this ‘theology’, Anjum laments, is being promulgated in the service of secular ‘statist extremism’ (Anjum 2022, sec. 1.45–16.00).

As a young philosopher Ricœur was a phenomenologist, believing that it is necessary to focus on consciousness as the source of direct experience and, following Husserl, concentrated upon the way we see the world on the assumption that this will determine how we understand it, as long as we exclude unnecessary confusions. For Husserl this was an extension of the Cartesian tradition, amplifying Descartes’ apparent faith in the human processes of cognition to develop rational thought. The result of such an explicitly subjective view and the belief that we make the world through our cognition, is that science too becomes subjective—its ‘objectivity’ is relinquished. However, we will only see clearly if we can decide how to ‘bracket off’ the distractions constantly present around us and focus on important matters. This follows a tradition established by Socrates: we must take our conscious experiences seriously and focus intently upon all that we experience, in order to understand better and avoid coincidental reaction to chance events. During his captivity in World War 2, Ricœur explored this credo by translating Husserl’s phenomenological Ideas into French, writing in tiny script in pencil in the margins of the German text.

4.4 Algeria and Empire

Algeria is prominent in my analysis of Ricœur’s early philosophy because it shows his relevance to colonial and postcolonial studies and its relation to his views on the abuse of power. It also shows us how he was able to use discussion to develop students’ ideas on truth and justice. Ricœur’s significant role in influencing French public discourse vis-à-vis the French colonies, Vietnam and Algeria has mostly been ignored,Footnote 4 and much work remains to be done in the Ricœur archives to further clarify his anticolonial thought and better understand the persistent influence upon modern culture of colonialism with its abusive power (Ricœur 1965b; Scott-Baumann 2021; Wolff 2021). I also contrast his approach to decolonizing in the 1940s–1960s with his failure in the 1970s–1990s on the USA campus to recognise the consequences of slavery: colonization of the body and soul.

Ricœur achieved his decolonizing influence regarding Algeria by exercising his right to speak out with students on campus and beyond, to assert moral agency and to be accountable as a French citizen, a public intellectual and a left-wing Christian, writing articles as president of the Mouvement du Christianisme Sociale. In his arguments he made use of existentialism, phenomenology, structuralism and anthropology and conducted intellectual debates that bore directly upon public attitudes.

In 1947 Ricœur wrote a paper entitled La question coloniale (The Colonial Question), through which he challenged his government to attend to the injustices and cruelty of colonialism, including chronic abuse of power, endemic racism and use of torture. Consistent with his personalist approach that emphasized personal responsibility, he warned against the nation state as the solution:

They [subjects of colonial rule] are right to do as we did, to be willing to be free before it is time; they are wrong, just as we were, to want to go through that useless detour of the nation-state. (Ricœur 2021, 18)

He posits that:

The goal of colonization is to disappear by itself. We can never repeat that loudly enough. The time scale and the process according to which French sovereignty (fully and very often without qualification) will have to give way to the political freedom of peoples, is a subordinate technical issue that demands competence. But the most beautiful civilizing work is aimed at equipping ever-growing areas of humanity for freedom. (Ricœur 2021, 18)

Yet, his unequivocal decolonial criticism sits in tension with his apparent belief that the colonizers are also civilizers. This tension is further complicated by his insistence that racism is the scourge of all colonialism, and holding himself responsible for being part of that scourge: ‘I don’t know much about French oppression in the colonies and I dread that my error is, mainly, a sin of omission in not informing myself’ (Ricœur 2021, 1947).

After the publication of Frantz Fanon’s (d. 1961) masterpiece Black Skin, White Masks in 1952, however, Ricœur could of course have informed himself, but I do not know that he did. Nor did he visit colonised lands and he accepted that this put him at a disadvantage in comprehending colonialism (1947). A year after Black Skin, White Masks was published, in 1953 Fanon moved to Algeria. There he experienced the truth of his conviction that ‘The white man is locked in his whiteness. The black man in his blackness’ (Fanon 2008, ix–x). There he continued his work as a psychiatrist by developing modern psychiatric practices in ways that showed how mental illness is characteristic to those oppressed by colonization. In 1961, the year he died from leukemia, he wrote in The Wretched of the Earth: 'There is thus during this calm period of successful colonization a regular and important mental pathology which is the direct product of oppression’ (Fanon 2001, 201, 1961). Ricœur too was influenced by modern psychiatric practices, but without Fanon’s insights into mental illness resulting from colonialism.

All the while, Ricœur insisted upon the moral necessity for peace in territories that had been part of the French empire and were still integral to what was known as the French Union: Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam (Ricœur 1951). He condemned the Vietnam war (1955–75), and in 1955, he wrote about an anti-imperial impetus that he hoped would end the cold war and was still hopeful of decolonisation within the French Union (the French colonies) (Ricœur 1955). Necessarily, however, his greatest focus remained Algeria since, unlike French territories further afield, it was under direct colonial rule for 132 years.

French public opinion against the Algerian war hardened when information on French atrocities and their torture of Algerians became available in 1957; public pressure led to the fall of the French government in 1958 (the Fourth Republic), and De Gaulle came to power to lead the Fifth Republic. The vicious seven-year war (1954–1962) which ended with Algeria’s independence still sparks strong resentment and antagonism amongst Algerians today—especially since France clearly retains very strong colonial-type links with Algeria.

4.5 Ricœur Versus Sartre: L’insoumission (Insubordination)

In 1960, many young Frenchmen, some of them recent university students, were being sent to fight in Algeria. On 05 September 1960, Jean-Paul Sartre, with supporters, published a letter in the national newspaper Le Monde calling on these soldiers to believe they had the right to insubordination since the war was unjust, and they should thus desert. Ricœur disagreed strongly, arguing that France was not a fascist state and thus did not merit desertion; second, that actions such as desertion should not be used to help the Algerians fight as the objective was to get France out of the war; and third that mass protest, not individual acts of rebellion, would bring negotiations closer (Dosse 2000, 304). Ricœur’s strong response to Sartre, L’insoumission (Insubordination), was published in Christianisme Sociale (Ricœur 1960). Ricœur’s argument reflects his determination that we should all be fully responsible for our language and behaviour, which, as I will show, contrasts with populist rhetoric and with the structuralist assertion that meaning is inherent in language structures, and not in the person who speaks and acts. However, further debate led to Ricœur also signing a statement that absolved deserters from guilt. This episode illustrates his measured, responsible reasoning; at the same time he was indeed instrumental in mass student protests against the war in Algeria.

In France and Algeria pressure was mounting with feverish debates on Algeria’s future: in January 1961, 75% of the French population voted in a referendum for Algeria to be freed; yet in April 1961 a group of French generals executed a coup to ensure that Algeria would remain under full French colonial rule. Ricœur was incensed and overrode his own belief that political declarations should not take place on campus: at the Sorbonne University where he was teaching at the time, he announced that current events transgressed political trust, which made it imperative to develop an attitude of active resistance together (Dosse 2000, 308). Jean Baubérot, who was a student at that time, told François Dosse about Ricœur’s balanced approach:

The way in which Ricœur managed the situation without absolutizing politics influenced us, because we didn’t want to claim to be Algerian resistance fighters and we also refused to demonize the kids returning home from active duty in Algeria, whom some people treated as if they were torturers. (Dosse 2000, 309)

The French Government had been concerned about Ricœur’s influence upon public opinion and upon students for some years, given his work with the left-wing journal Esprit and his presidency of the Mouvement du Christianisme Sociale, where he made clear his aversion to the torture used by the French army in Algeria (Dosse 2000, 302–303). On 9 June 1961, at 06.00, while Ricœur was marking examination papers at home before breakfast, the police arrived, searched his house for arms or Algerian fighters, found neither, and then arrested him under suspicion of collaborating in activities against the French state (Dosse 2000, 267–268, 308–309). This action against Ricœur was evidence of state discrimination against those who supported the Arab cause in Algeria.

Vicious discrimination against Arabs themselves in France reached its nadir later that year: on 17 October 1961, thousands of Algerians working in Paris organised a peaceful demonstration against a curfew that had recently been imposed by the French police only upon Algerian Muslims: this led to the infamous Paris massacre. On that night, and during subsequent detentions and torture, a lethal mix of religion, class, poverty and ethnicity was used to justify state authorised murder of Algerian Muslims in Paris. As many as two hundred Algerian Muslims may have died—beaten to death, shot or thrown into the Seine to drown. These events have never been properly documented or atoned for in any way by the French state; in the 2022 French presidential election contest in which Emmanuel Macron (once a research assistant to Ricœur) had to, for the second time, fight off a serious challenge from the far-right populist Marine Le Pen, French voices were raised in vain again to persuade Macron to apologise.

4.6 Methodological Dialectics and Hermeneutics

Ricœur’s methods can help us to dismantle populist binaries such as those used by Marine Le Pen. This is because he worked on questions of method all his life and used dialectics in moderation, urging caution, unlike those who develop extreme populist binaries like ‘woke’ and ‘antiwoke’ currently:

…the idea of a unique and exhaustive dialectical understanding of the social dynamic must be exposed as false; dialectics is a method and a working hypothesis; it is excellent when it is limited by other possible systems of interpretation …. And when it is not in power. (Ricœur 1965b, 190)

Indeed, the manipulative binaries of populism can be better understood by using Ricœur’s dialectic: this shows the difference between extremes that can broaden an argument as with Ricœur, and extremes that can narrow an argument, as with the divisive language of populism that narrows our knowledge base.

Ricœur was fascinated by central issues of knowledge and language. He concluded that the method we choose and the questions we ask in order to solve a problem will determine the outcome. The position we start from will determine where we end up. Pure scientists and social scientists are keenly aware of this. Of course, it is occasionally possible to start inductively and develop fresh ideas, but this is very rare because we depend on existing topics and existing language. The tendency in social science and the humanities is to use words as the measurement of reality; and since our chosen words affect the content of our inquiry, we thus risk only finding what we seek, i.e. the one half of a binary we select (whilst rejecting the other half). As an example of how this habit distorts our thinking, Ricœur used a dialectical approach to analyse the two terms ‘ideology’ and ‘utopia’ (Ricœur 1976). Using Marx, he described the negative connotations of ‘ideology’ as concealment and distortion and cites Geertz to consider the rhetorical powers of ideology, that seek to legitimate authority with words that distort reality. For utopia, using Thomas More’s creation of ‘nowhere’ as an impossible ideal brings the possibilities of improving society, using many and usually contradictory and unrealistic predictions. Utopia subverts, whereas ideology adverts to authority. They seem inverse, yet they are similar: both ideology and utopia are delusional since they both arise from systemic distortions in our cultural imaginations; he shows their differences and similarities and their dialectical interconnectedness:

We have to call upon the ‘healthy’ function of ideology to cure the madness of utopia and … the critique of ideology can only be carried out by a conscience capable of regarding itself from the point of view of ‘nowhere’. (Ricœur 1976, 28)

We can use this approach when angered by extreme populist assertions. To help us live with these uncertainties and confusions stitched into our lives, Ricœur also developed hermeneutic approaches: he interpreted reality through linguistic devices such as narrative. Stories open us to risk and create conflicting interpretations that involve self-understanding; this leads in turn to the tension that is necessary for possible improvement of some sense of self.

Ricœur adopted the phenomenological dependence upon the self as interpreter of reality and, in order to avoid the risk of narcissistic absorption latent in some phenomenology, invited the self to see itself reflected in the other: this is the other person who is ultimately incomprehensible yet bears similarities to the way we see ourselves. Through this antinomy, this insoluble tension between similar yet incompatible phenomena, we may be able to see ourselves afresh. In hermeneutics, the other is also represented in the tension created by the confusion of being faced with the multiple meanings of language.

History and Truth (Ricœur 1965b) is a collection of essays that shows clearly this tension between the methods we choose for exploring an object of interest, and our reasons for using the chosen methods: in Negativity and Primary Affirmation, an essay written at the height of the Algerian crisis, Ricœur chose a phenomenological method that also has a Kantian note of overcoming negativity by accepting our limits (Ricœur 1965c).Footnote 5 Kant’s racism, to which I have drawn attention, cannot be ignored (as it often is; see Sect. 3.2), but his very important rationalist philosophy of limits that shows us the inadequacy of much of our understanding, can be argued to form the backbone of modern western philosophy. By reflecting, questioning and becoming aware of the limits of our knowledge, Ricœur believed we will be able to act morally; for Ricœur, as for Hallaq, there must never be a separation between methods and ethics, which is a theme he explored continuously. Ricœur wished for the ensuing benefits which are hard to achieve but potentially powerful, as long as we use language ethically:

An ‘open society’, to use Popper’s term, is one which acknowledges that political debate is infinitely open and thus prepared to take the critical step back in order to continually interrogate and reconstitute the conditions of an authentic language. (Kearney 2004, 137–38)

4.7 Linguistic Analysis and Structuralism as Method

‘Consciousness is not a given but a task’ and language is the instrument that provides both the methodology for better understanding of the self and others and also the content of such thought (Ricœur 1974b). In his journey towards these conclusions, Ricœur taught university courses on ancient philosophy and modern thought, including structuralism, and wrote detailed notes in preparation for them all. Many of these lectures inspired a Ricœur paper, a book chapter, a book or all three.

For structuralists, linguistic laws can be applied to language in order to know which linguistic codes operate and how binary oppositions can be used to identify and predict language patterns. Lévi-Strauss developed Saussure’s analysis of linguistic binaries into a system that he believed would provide a taxonomy of societies. Ricœur could see the utility of applying these principles as a linguistic science for understanding language structures and possibly even for mapping pre-identified life patterns such as kinship or incest in supposedly less sophisticated cultures. He made use of structuralism for linguistic analysis, but rejected completely the use of its cool, systematic analysis that seeks deeper textual meaning and avoids implicating the human when looking at cultural aspects that cannot be defined in advance (Ricœur 1974a); for culture-cum-philosophy he preferred something more Hegelian that focuses upon meaning with ‘a logic which would be that of contents not of syntaxes’ (Ricœur 1974a, 51).

His 1960 publication Symbolism of Evil thus explores the phenomenological ways in which we actively interpret objects, words and ideas as symbolic—as representing something else (Ricœur 1967). With regards to ‘sin’, in Fallible Man, he recounts how three images recur repeatedly in Christian religious narrative: the fall, the stain, and the deviation from the path; and he warns against too zealous a condemnation of oneself, as that could lead to belief in original sin and possibly a debilitating lack of self-belief and lack of agency (Ricœur 1965a). In Islam, there is no concept of original sin since Adam and Eve inhabiting the earth was preordained for humans to take on the role of trustees, and there is no ‘stain’ associated since God taught Adam the words of repentance to compensate for the ‘slip’ (Harvey 2018, 14). Neither interpretation would be viable in structuralist thought, which would focus upon meaning as carried by syntax more than by semantics as carried by the reader. And yet Ricœur did not reject structuralism—as many did; rather, in order to get to grips with it, he brought together the philosophers of the journal, Esprit, and they met as a group for a year to discuss The Savage Mind, Lévi-Strauss’s 1962 structuralist masterpiece. This exemplifies Ricœur’s determination to climb inside a structure of thought and master it in order to understand and deploy both its limitations and its utility (Dosse 2000, 349).

4.8 Activism Beyond Negation

In the 1950s, Ricœur published his first major book Freedom and Nature (1950/1966 English), which was followed by History and Truth (1955/1965), Fallible Man (1960/1965) and Symbolism of Evil (1960/1967). In this sequence of works he grappled with human fallibility, frailty and the capacity to do wrong. It was also in the early 1950s that he started lecturing on negation, i.e. the ways we reject that which we don’t like and also measure ourselves by lack, longing and loss rather than by what we have and who we are; and for twenty years he deliberated upon the concept, hoping to develop a philosophy of negation that would provide a both/ and model of addressing problems, to replace the binary either/ or (Scott-Baumann 2013, 129). His students at Strasbourg, the Sorbonne, Nanterre and, to a much lesser extent, Chicago experienced the material arranged in different sequences depending on who he imagined negation to have arisen from: among others, the ancient Greeks, Plotinus and Sartre, each in different ways. The students were his witnesses and he explained to them in his lectures how he was developing the theme of negation with them from one term to the next (Ricœur, n.d.). By the time he abandoned negation as a project in the 1970s, he had integrated the concept into his analysis of language: it became his deep and abiding conviction that the negative plays an integral part in our thought and our syntax, as is the case with metaphor; yet he saw how we seek to avoid, deny and reject the negative itself. If we are to make a better world, we have to accept that the negative resides in us all, and we cannot therefore simply use it as a way of distancing ourselves from that which we do not like.

Ricœur did not apply the negative impulse to decolonization: it was clear to him that colonial issues could not be solved by negative Sartrean existentialism, which measured worth by disruptive and ideologically driven activism, as happened in the L’insoumission (Insubordination) episode (see Sect. 4.5). Nor, with its focus on improving human perception, could phenomenology alone tackle the horrors of colonization since many, like Ricœur, did not visit and experience the colonies. So, instead, he combined phenomenological understanding of the self as an ethical being who is responsible for self-management but not entitled to command and control others—which he felt Sartre was attempting with the desertion proposal. Ricœur protested with students, wrote passionately in journals, used his left-wing Christianity as both structure and allegiance, and engaged directly with the philosophical movements that he found inadequate to the task. He enacted this as an academic and public intellectual, albeit sometimes naively, as we will see in Chap. 5.

4.9 Communities of Inquiry Sample: Discussing Decolonisation

Use the passage below and Rethinking Political Thinkers (Ramgotra and Choat 2023) to develop a working definition of decolonisation.

‘Decolonising the curriculum’ refers to the idea that the curriculum reflects western accounts of history and does so from a white, establishment perspective (conjuring terms such as ‘dead white men’/‘pale, stale and male’….) (Morreira et al. 2021). In order for history to be as full a record as possible, however, it would need to also tell others' stories by embedding the voices of minorities, those of colour and those who were dominated and exploited by the Belgian, British, French and Spanish empires. In Britain, decolonizing the curriculum becomes a matter of recognition for Africa. In Africa is not a country: breaking sterotypes of modern Africa, Dipo Faloyin describes how, following direct colonisation, from 1881 to 1914 seven European nations arbitrarily carved the African continent of over 6 million people speaking well over 1,000 languages into 54 territories; they became today’s troubled nation states, many of which are still in thrall to European powers (Faloyin 2022); thus the cry for decolonisation and freedom from neocolonial realities remains strong and persistent.

A decolonized canon would not only clarify Britain’s full history but also fully recognize the contributions of its peoples of colour. However, designing and implementing decolonized curricula would require a major shift in thinking from many educators and students, especially since it is hotly contested by many commentators, educators and politicians who want to preserve the traditions that present the British empire as a greater good (Olusoga 2016). To exacerbate matters, the government has incorporated it into the culture wars, accusing the university sector of making unreasonable and unjustifiable complaints.

Yet within this debate there are tensions too: when Britain focuses upon Africa as a target for decolonisation this can function as another form of colonization by applying a deficit model to a continent as if it is one country. In terms of what African nations themselves should be doing, one view is that of academics such as Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò who reject the ‘decolonisation industry’, arguing it is ‘intellectually unsound’, ‘wholly unrealistic’ and that it ‘attacks its own cause’Footnote 6; rather, Táíwò insists on a more positive view to find ways forward, arguing that the cultural hybridity that charactizes modern Africa can provide the continent with the strength to free itself—in its own way—from the decolonisation narrative (Táíwò 2022).

From a global perspective, in whichever way decolonisation can/ cannot be helpful, what is clear is that the economic and environmental crises cannot be tackled without tackling racism, class, slavery and its residues, and combatting the colonialism that is an integral part of all our systems of thought and the social structures of poverty and wealth (Craig 2022). Appreciating Kant’s philosophical legacy yet challenging his racism would be productive, for example. Indeed Campbell argues that it’s necessary to face pedagogical racism in order to decolonise the curriculum (Campbell et al. 2022).