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5.1 What Happened in 1968?

In the late 1960s Ricœur, now an important leading intellectual, was involved in setting up a new university for the Sorbonne at Nanterre. Nanterre University was an ambitious and innovative experiment intended to fulfil his dream of the open, egalitarian campus. This was hijacked by student unrest and led to him resigning as Dean of the Faculty of Letters after two years (1969–71). Here I show what happened to illustrate how his theories (analysed in Chap. 4) compare with events. My exploration of his 1968 experience will set clear historical boundaries between then and now, so we can see how much or how little progress has been made on campus.

In the 1960s Ricœur had a very good reputation among his students as a lecturer, and there are thousands of pages of detailed lecture notes held at the Fonds Ricœur archives that show how well he prepared each lecture and each sequence of lectures. But he was tired of the large impersonal lecture setup at the Sorbonne and wanted to break the sterile hegemony of this hierarchical model of higher education: he sought an alternative. This challenge led him to the mud pits of the building site for the new university, Nanterre, which was then a sprawling working-class suburb of Paris, where decrepit shantytowns housed Algerian migrant workers. Through his appointment there, Ricœur, in an idealistic leap of faith, wanted to broaden Paris’s student population by attempting to overturn class and ethnic differences. This experiment ended badly for him, with police being called onto campus; this created disappointment and humiliation and exposed a deep gulf between his ideas and his practice. Consequently, his methods for facilitating change became less clearly phenomenological and existential (of the Gabriel Marcel mode) and more hermeneutic: from his aversion to colonial abuses, he carried over his determination not to use language as a form of conquest and domination to win an argument (see Chap. 4).

The débacle at Nanterre provides an instructive contrast with English universities both then and now, and highlights the question of what a university should be. In the 1950s and 1960s, French students, mostly white, middle class and male, particularly in urban conurbations, became suspicious of university management of the curriculum: they felt they were not being allowed to determine what they studied, and they were angry about world events involving France (Algeria) and America (the Vietnam war). Ricœur campaigned actively with students to end both wars. In the mid-1960s he saw more trouble brewing as students became increasingly discontented. The political iconography was potent: there were posters of Mao Zedong, who was uncritically admired as transforming China. Che Guevara and Fidel Castro (in Cuba) and Ho Chi Minh (in Vietnam) were admired for standing up to the USA. At the same time, Ricœur was working on the hermeneutics of suspicion and on negativity and was sensitive to the negativity of students’ demands, agreeing with them that there was a lot at stake.

Contrarily, Vinen doubts whether much actually happened in 1968, suggesting that the French revolt of 1968–71 was focused upon a desire for better education and more rights and was therefore really just a manifestation of the individualism encouraged by increasing consumerism and other societal factors (Vinen 2018). Moreover, English university campuses from the1960s to the 2020s have rarely shown signs of rebellion, revolt or revolution. The posters which accompanied student protests in France were admired in the UK more as art than as symbols of liberation from tyranny.

I thus wonder what (if anything) political activism means to most English students; I wonder whether long-standing passivity creates a sort of crisis on campus which, in effect, now demands that we accept being ventriloquised by social media and being complicit with the powerful who govern our consumerised lives (Scott-Baumann 2019). Dispiritingly, Ricœur’s activism may not have produced anything more fruitful, with his dream of better university conversations with students than those offered by the Sorbonne seemingly ending in the wastepaper basket which a Nanterre student rammed over Ricœur’s head in exasperation.

Nevertheless, what happened in Nanterre is important for our understanding of Ricœur’s philosophy and for delineating the limits and strengths of conversation as mediation, in which he placed so much trust. Given the festering twenty-first century crisis about free speech and academic freedom, this comparative analysis will also contribute to our understanding of university campuses now and for charting a way forward. The existence of women on campus and in philosophy was also becoming historically significant in 1968; yet, despite his general compassion and support for women staff and students (as commented upon to me by his friend Mireille Delbraccio in 2010), Ricœur’s default position was male and white, which will become increasingly significant as the narrative evolves.

5.2 Ricœur’s Commentaries on the University Crisis: 1968 and Beyond

The four Ricœur papers I outlined in Chap. 2 show us the progression, evolution and frustrations that motivated his thinking about university education and will form the framework for this chapter (Ricœur 1964, 1968a, b, 1971b). Further analysis of them here will show what has changed in the fifty-plus years since, and how much has stayed the same. By contrasting the 1960s with current developments, the twenty-first century English university can be shown to be symptomatic of a state that has been deliberately shrunken by successive governments with decreased interest in state-funded education and development of ideas.

The 1964 paper, Faire l’Université (Making the University), is the summary of an inquiry that he organised to look at how the university sector could manage the challenges facing it; it preceded by four years the staggering events of May 1968 which saw French students and unions working together to disrupt French society, and which even led President De Gaulle to flee the country briefly. Ricœur’s student interviewees requested root and branch reform of what they experienced as the long drawn out, slow, dry pedagogic grind of huge lectures, seminars, workgroups and discussions—and one student predicted that without better organised teaching, staff would soon see their teaching called into question and students would see themselves as ‘violated and infantilised’ (Ricœur 1964). Ricœur supported these demands and also recommended that each student should have a folder kept on their academic and personal development, to offer maximal support and guidance (Ricœur 1964). No action was taken on his report, which probably had no formal authority, and so he continued to develop the idea of establishing a new university, animated by an approach that insisted upon listening to those with no authority or status; in this way, he paralleled the decolonizing ethos. His philosophy was egalitarian: he insisted that philosophy was only one form of knowledge, and never the ultimate arbiter.

Two remarkable elements stand out here in contrast to the campus today. First, in the 1960s Ricœur was very unusual in using this pedagogy that shares characteristics with decolonizing approaches which reduce the power differential between student and teacher. Believing that personal communication is crucial, he disliked intensely the huge Sorbonne lectures and being inaccessible as lecturer and craved the opportunity to discuss ideas with individuals and small groups of students. He implemented this by using informal interview methods to collect opinions from students. This approach is relatively common today; yet many students of colour still feel as if they are trapped in a colonial time warp (Scott-Baumann et al. 2020). Second, looking back on this vision, Ricœur’s unquestioning confidence that the state would continue to view higher education as an enterprise to be supported and valued seems remarkable; by contrast, in England and Wales students are now customers who show their approval or otherwise of services rendered by means of student satisfaction surveys, and who incur debts for their education that many will never be able to pay back. In 1964 Ricœur predicted that the progressive loss of direction in western societies would manifest itself on campus, and that it would soon spread from there into society-wide challenges to capitalism and to bureaucracy.

Ricœur’s concerns of unrest for the university sector and for wider society were realized in 1968—the year he wrote the preface to a book entitled Conceptions de l’Université (Designing the University) (Dreze et al. 1968). By that time he had already witnessed rising tensions including the ten-day strike orchestrated by Nanterre students in November 1967, and the altercation between student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit and government minister François Missoffe in January 1968 at the official opening of the Nanterre university swimming pool; in response to Cohn-Bendit challenging him on his apparent ignorance of male students’ sexual frustrations (the student dormitories were single sex), the minister invited him to cool off in the pool. Furthermore, on 21 March, Nanterre student Xavier Langlade was arrested for taking part in an anti-Vietnam attack on the Parisian American Express office; in revenge for the arrest, Cohn-Bendit led the student rebels to occupy the Nanterre Senate Chamber. They stayed in that highly symbolic and prestigious space until 1.30 in the morning (Reader and Wadia 1993). So despite Ricœur’s devotion to conversations for conflict resolution, Nanterre was providing a flashpoint for unrest; buoyed up by solidarity with worker strikes, sophisticated philosophy classes were not helping: the students were not listening.

The fragility of debate for resolving conflict became increasingly evident and by 30 April there was anarchy: led again by Cohn-Bendit, over a thousand students piled into a lecture theatre on the Nanterre campus, demanding freedom to act. Whilst over twenty professors demanded that the students be subject to disciplinary measures, Ricœur was among a minority of staff who strongly disagreed, encouraging dialogue. The Nanterre Dean, Pierre Grappin, decreed that the Nanterre campus would be closed as the situation was out of control, so the students decamped to the Sorbonne on 3 May and, when the police carted off the loudest provocateurs in the paniers a salades, (‘lettuce shakers’ being the slang for police vans with their wire grilles), the remainder took this as provocation and launched what would prove to be, completely spontaneously, the first night of the barricades (Dosse 2000, 461–474). On 6 May, eight students (including Cohn-Bendit) attended a disciplinary hearing which ended chaotically because the academics instructed to adjudicate felt they had no authority to issue punishment; the students enjoyed themselves at the event due to its surreal and inconclusive nature, which showed the futility of Ricœur’s invitation to both parties to debate and negotiate. There were no structures for a different balance of power that might arise if the young demanded that the old justify themselves, instead of the other way around. After finding their elders amusingly impotent the students regrouped en masse: there were violent riots that night, with four hundred students and two hundred police injured. University towns throughout France erupted, especially Nantes and Strasbourg.

The Sorbonne was still under occupation and rioting was intense across campuses when Ricœur wrote his three-part 1968 paper Réforme et révolution dans l’Université (Reform and Revolution in the University). First published in the national French newspaper Le Monde on 9, 11 and 12 June 1968, it offered Ricœur’s responses ‘in real time’. They show Ricœur’s frustrations being tempered by a pragmatic wish to be conciliatory during an ongoing crisis for the university sector and for society generally. Ricœur argued within the context of ‘the crisis’ for more democratic processes that would enable students to have some say in managing their education. Yet his attempts to achieve this during the riots led to more chaos. Indeed, much worse was to come in spring 1970, when Ricœur lost control of the Nanterre campus; he was Dean when police were allowed onto the site. This ‘banalisation’ (in French this meant opening the campus up to the law enforcers) exacerbated the situation and certainly created loss of trust in Ricœur’s judgment from colleagues and students. On 4 March 1970, however, Le Monde published his Dean’s letter (communiqué du doyen), in which he made it clear that the invitation to the police to come onto the site had been made very suddenly without his consultation, let alone agreement (Dosse 2000, 485; Ricœur et al. 1998, 34–40). The power of militant activism deployed by Cohn-Bendit and others trumped Ricœur’s subtle dialectic—his philosophical interest at the time. Ricœur resigned from his post.

With regard to philosophy, Ricœur wrote prolifically and taught many courses in this time of post-war societal change from 1960–1969. His students, who were born during or after World War 2, were beginning to shape the world with righteous protest and the determination to speak truth to power, in ways that they believed their elders had signally failed to do by allowing fascism to dominate mainland Europe. We must also see the febrile world context in which they rebelled. Many French students knew about and regretted their country’s and others’ colonial actions and made attempts to demand justice: they recalled 1954 Dien Bien Phu, 1955 Bandung, 1959 Cuba, and the 1960s African movements for independence; they despised the French government’s dealings with Algeria (‘freed’ in 1962); they noted the 1966 tricontinental conference which attempted to build an anti-imperial, anti-colonial coalition of Africa, Asia and Latin America and sought to use revolutionary means; and there was always Vietnam, where conflict was intensifying. During this period his philosophy reflected his preoccupation with good and evil, his increased interest in Freud and his ever-deeper investigation into the symbolic nature of meaning and the role language plays in mediating between symbol and reality.

In addition to full length philosophical analyses of human nature and morals (Fallible Man 1960/1965 and The Symbolism of Evil 1960/1967), Ricœur also wrote essays about history, politics and societal matters (History and Truth 1955/1965); he had, earlier, also written on Husserl (1949–57/1967). Of particular significance to this time of violence and conflicting views from 1960–70, are his philosophical Freud studies: Freud and Philosophy (1966/1970), and a more accessible sequel called The Conflict of Interpretations (1969/1974); and Political and Social Essays (1974), the last collection spanning writings from 1956–73. I draw upon some of these works because they resonate strongly with events that he was experiencing, involving communication, universities and higher education, as well as matters related to sexuality. In particular, Freud’s belief in inner conflict (i.e. the deterministic structure of the sexualized subconscious as the determining and fracturing impulse of human motivation) was a feature Ricœur believed he saw in the students.

Indeed, as philosopher-witness, it seemed to Ricœur that one could actually attribute the events of May 1968 partly to a sexual revolution (Ricœur 1974a). Earlier, in 1960 he was attentive to the growing ‘sexual revolution’ facilitated by contraceptives. He contributed at that point to an edition of the left-wing journal Esprit called ‘La sexualité’ (Sexuality). He asserted that birth control makes it possible for love and tenderness to exist separately from procreation in a marriage, thereby making possible the perfection of interpersonal relationships. Yet he announced also that there are risks when ‘Eroticism appears to become a dimension of leisure’ (Ricœur 1960, 1673). He wasn’t surprised when the male students on the Nanterre campus demanded access to the female dormitories. In fact, there is evidence of the woman’s voice, although not heard much at the time of May 1968, becoming important and signalling the beginning of emancipation generated by the contraceptive pill and by gradually improved societal understanding of gender, sexuality and femaleness. Ricœur attributed the unrest also to the mixing of socio-economic groups (middle-class and working class, broadly speaking), which he wanted to encourage.

Broadly speaking, philosophically, he combined phenomenology and hermeneutics (i.e. perception of our world combined with interpretation of what may lie concealed). He attempted to contextualise the huge impact of Hegel in mainland Europe. Ricœur admired Hegel’s contention that coexistence within institutional structures is necessary but struggled against Hegel’s attempt to be all-encompassing.

5.3 Hermeneutics of Suspicion

Ricœur saw the human struggle to categorize the world into binaries also in the human use of suspicion: in European and American philosophy he is famous for developing the concept of the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ (Scott-Baumann 2009). Hermeneutics originated with textual analysis, but Ricœur followed Dilthey and Schleiermacher in ‘reading’ beneath human behaviour for motivations and meanings not visible on the surface of our interactions. With this idea he compared the ways in which Freud, Marx and Nietzsche made us suspicious of our own thought and action in the realms of, respectively, the unconscious mind, money and power. Descartes’ belief that we understand ourselves because we can think and express ourselves with language, is fully negated by Freud’s assertion that we are often unconscious of our thoughts and desires—and that we respond to them unknowingly in the form of impulses, verbal slips of the tongue and neuroses. This is often because of conflict between our desires and cultural mores, in some cases possibly but not necessarily from childhood trauma. Ricœur saw this insistent suspicion of human motives in Marx and Nietzsche as well as Freud.

Ricœur abandoned the term hermeneutics of suspicion once he came to believe that Freud, Marx and Nietzsche, the masters of suspicion, took suspicion too far in their wholesale critique and rejection of religion. He saw this as symptomatic of an overzealous, sweeping method of deploying a hermeneutics of suspicion: hermeneutics is based on the hope of finding productive meaning and contains the doubt created by suspicion, whereas suspicion is based on the desire to unmask apparent meaning as false. Hermeneutics would suffice. He came to see possibilities within hermeneutics to challenge meanings as well as to endorse them, which would render unnecessary the destructive use of suspicion. He hoped we could use suspicion in a way that is directly proportional to the situation at hand, which requires the ability to calibrate how suspicious one should be, and how to be able to trust oneself and others (Scott-Baumann 2009, 59–77).

Thus Ricœur (briefly, for less than a decade) deployed the term ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ to indicate that we should doubt our own perceptions and experiences, as they may be influenced by unconscious emotional factors over which we have no control and of which we have little or no knowledge (Scott-Baumann 2009, 46); during this period, he watched students dealing with complex new freedoms, such as access to each other’s student accommodation. Although Ricœur abandoned the term hermeneutics of suspicion, he retained hermeneutic practice in Freud’s brilliant analysis of the unconscious and saw how it also relates to the existentialist assertion that we are part of the world we interpret, such that the self and its understanding of the other are interconnected: our attempts at hermeneutical interpretation carry our personal baggage. Freud helps to demystify our faulty and delusional grasp of truth, by describing and thus releasing us partially from our inescapable animal essence, and offering us more honesty than any religion, culture or historical tradition has hitherto done. Freud was the dominant influence upon Ricœur of the three; yet Ricœur baulked at Freud’s determinism and excoriation of religion, wishing that faith, hope and positive thinking could be a better way than the negative.

5.4 The Changes Ricœur Wanted—Then and Now

To understand the idea of the university now in the twenty-first century, it is important and illustrative to consider what happened to Ricœur in the Paris suburb of Nanterre and its eponymous university, and why. His three-part 1968 paper Réforme et Revolution dans l’Université (Reform and Revolution in the University) was about the necessity of HE reforms, and was written with three specific goals in mind: first, to reformulate and update the idea of the liberal university; second to overturn old hierarchies by creating dialogue between liberal conventions and militant radical elements on campus; and third, to develop a permeable membrane between university and wider society. By 1971, after the Nanterre campus riots, he was arguing for acceptance of student politics on campus and a full understanding of demographic changes in the student body (age, class and numbers). He saw how the identity crises facing the whole of society (increased secularism, sexual changes related to the contraceptive pill, dominance of cultural mediocrity and continued elitism) were playing havoc with the very idea of the university as it metamorphosed into an entity that risked becoming either too dangerous in its challenge to the state or too complicit with the government. He also noted the increasing tension between the idea of universities as, on the one hand, the source of knowledge, and on the other hand, as training grounds for jobs.

Meanwhile the American and the British university system, although still elitist and sexist, already seemed to Ricœur to represent the practical approaches for which he longed: tutorial systems, smaller lecture halls than the Sorbonne, and academic staff on site available for one-to-one tutorials and group discussion. Across the Channel, British university students took a more aesthetic, less political approach to the change from adolescence to adulthood: they seemed on the whole to express dissatisfaction with the establishment through music, art and culturally eccentric self-expression (clothes, hair, sexual experimentation), and not through manning barricades.

Ricœur understood much French student thinking to be characterised by ‘phenomenological distress’ i.e. the self-doubt and confusion of not understanding one’s own thinking (Ricœur 1974a, 1970); he thus felt that students would benefit from discussion and debate, not from revolt. Those discussions would explore, with some caveats, the thoughts of Marx, Freud and Nietzsche who postulated that humans cannot understand themselves because they are not in conscious control of their thinking but are controlled by financial pressures, by unconscious sexualized thoughts and by the power of others, respectively. Yet caution would be required since the hermeneutics of suspicion that they created (especially Freud) was too destructive with offering the shattered post-Cartesian cogito; student militant suspicion of authority was too blunt an instrument to resolve a wide range of motives including sexual frustration and discontent with a university education that failed to address real world matters.

In 1967, as French student activism was beginning to build up, Ricœur published Violence and Language, an essay in which he demonstrates the dangers of popular impulses clashing with hegemonic state powers, individual autonomy and the desire for equal co-existence. Violence arises quintessentially from an imbalance of power, and he saw this as an integral component of all political activity as part of his understanding that humans are political (Ricœur 1974b). The power of the state can be communicated via the law:

The State is a reality maintained and instituted by murderous violence. Through this connection with the unjustifiable, the State confronts man with a difficult choice, the choice between two ethics of distress: the one assumes murder in order to assure the physical survival of the state, in order to preserve the magistrate; the other affirms treason in order to bear witness. (Ricœur 1965, 246)

In 2023, we see this violence manifested in linguistic features and violent actions that have become characteristic of the amorphous and hydra-headed political impulse called populism; being a ‘thin ideology’, populism cannot stand alone and is thus parasitic upon another ideology (usually liberal democracy) from which populism asserts that it feels alienated and apparently against whom it picks fights upon those considered less protected by law, such as Muslims or black people. Race attacks, murders and sexual violence happen under such a regime. Yet this version of populism in effect continues the work of the violent state, rather than attacking it as it disingenuously promises to do.

By contrast, the populism witnessed in 1968 France was what Laclau and Mouffe view as politically desirable since, as a movement, it engaged and united both workers and students in pursuit of better conditions for work and study respectively. The camaraderie between French students at the barricades (especially at urban universities) and the workers’ unions was both powerful and pragmatic; together they believed they could rock de Gaulle’s government and indeed they did; the protesters subsequently secured improved working conditions and better salaries for French workers. Ricœur’s hope that such activism would translate into active student engagement with university structures at Nanterre was realized insomuch that students won the right to sit on management committees (cogestion, co-management). However, that hope was tempered with what Ricœur had predicted would happen (while he was seeking useful forms of collaboration with students through discussion in 1964): because of administrative bureaucracy, cogestion turned out to be somewhat illusory access to influence and students were left dissatisfied (Ricœur 1964; Dosse 2000, 374).

5.5 Negation and the Feminist Cause

Much has been written about the way in which the 1968 revolts in Paris seemed to be, and probably were, male-dominated (Scott-Baumann 2019), and yet, paradoxically, how these protests also made it possible for young women university students to begin to chart a course towards some sort of parity with their male counterparts. Soon after these events, Foucault would argue that sexuality and sexual difference constitute the dominant discourse of power in the West (Foucault 1979).

Ricœur lacked a philosophical interest in feminism or in questions of gender. My work on his study of negation shows his significant avoidance of, and actually even resistance to, any gender perspective (Scott-Baumann 2016; Uggla 2010). Denying the salience of difference is important also in terms of his conflicted attitudes towards identity which come to the fore in Chap. 6. Ricœur’s views on identity allow me to explore in Chaps. 6 and 7 the tension between his way of thinking that accords equivalence to each and all in their capacity to suffer, to struggle in accepting personal failings and imperfections and also to enjoy life, and his refusal to acknowledge, indeed negate, the worse experiences of those specific groups (women, the disabled or those of colour) who have less access to the automatic acceptance accorded to the privileged (white people or the powerful). In fact, I will show in Chap. 6 that he knew we should all be, and yet clearly are not, equal before the law; yet he worried about special, specific demands for recognition that he regarded as specious.

By 1997 he was describing himself as following a ‘sexually neutral thesis’. This suffered, he acknowledged, from ‘the limits of a male way of thinking and writing’ (Ricœur 1997) and he accepted that this limited his thought; yet he believed that this lack of the female voice in the philosophy he was writing ‘does not seem to me to require a basic revision of my sexually neutral theses.’ As I have discussed elsewhere, this is a contradiction in terms: it is not possible to write in a ‘sexually neutral’ way and also follow a male or female or other-gendered way of thinking (Scott-Baumann 2016).

He did not see the gender question as a philosophical matter. I assert that gender must be both a political and a philosophical matter because explicit consideration of gender may facilitate the inclusion of the woman’s voice.

In Islamic circles currently there are issues about participation, access to knowledge creation and status. Some Muslim scholars, usually male, are asking that women and their bodies should become active in ‘Islamic public and intellectual life’, as Khaled Abou El Fadl does; contrasting the dearth of women who are engaged now with the ‘at least 2500 extraordinary women jurists, narrators of HadithFootnote 1 and poets throughout Islamic history’, Abou El Fadl pleads for the reemergence of women narrators of jurisprudence, actively and publicly engaged with law (Abou El Fadl 2017). In the Muslim world, Egyptian Zaynab al-Ghazali (d. 2005) was an anomaly in her scholarly activism (Abou El Fadl 2017); in his brief biography of her including her teaching and her torture Moazzam Begg echoes Abou El Fadl with his question for Muslims: ‘In our homes, communities, and countries, have we nurtured societies and environments that could ever produce the likes of Zaynab al-Ghazali, or have we capitulated?’ (Begg 2021). By contrast, in the secular arena of UK politics there are more Muslim women MPs than male (Chapman 2019), whilst overall 35% of MPs and 29% of peers are women (Institute for Government 2021).

In the western academy too gendered hierarchies endure, and this, as Shuruq Naguib's research demonstrates, extends to the coverage of Islamic Studies (Scott-Baumann et al. 2020; Ali 2013, 2017, 2019; IIITMedia 2017). The female exceptions in academia—Muslim and otherwise—can, nevertheless, help philosophers and theologians to focus on both women and men and to consider whether Ricœur’s strongly dialectical, provisional approach can be of use in looking at the representation of women in higher education. He certainly perceived the power of human agency as well as humans’ vulnerability:

The openness of need by which I am wanting the world; the openness of suffering itself by which I find myself exposed to the outside, confronted by its threat, open like an unprotected flank; the openness of perception by which I receive the other; lacking, being vulnerable, receiving. (Ricœur 1965, 307)

The vulnerability intrinsic to such a statement seems to lend itself to the understanding of the ‘other’ about which he has written so much. Much later, in Oneself as Another, he wrote that our understanding of the other person is ‘not only that of a comparison (oneself similar to another) but indeed that of an implication (oneself inasmuch as being other) (Ricœur 1992, 3).

5.6 Ricœur Disappointed

Ricœur saw the university crisis as a societal problem: in his 1968 paper Conceptions de l’Université (Designing the University), he foresaw the risk if universities were to become defensive; he saw the struggles between republican and militant radical impulses as dangerous for universities. If societal pressure were to replace the university with something more akin to radical, revolutionary principles, this would significantly weaken the university as such a change would represent, in his view, cultural structures such as structuralism or Marxism untethered from depth of intellectual understanding. He could also see how impotent and perplexed the university becomes when faced with demands for recognition (individual and group recognition from students) without knowing whether such recognition would lead to increased participation or more standoffs (Ricœur 1968a, 16–18). At the end of 1971, when he had resigned his post at Nanterre, he spoke at a conference in Namur of the toll it took on him personally:

I experienced at Nanterre the impossibility of combining nowadays the institution and this dream of liberty, and this is the heart of the drama and of the contemporary tearing. (Ricœur 1972, 548)

Yet I note that the 1971 paper reiterates the major point from his 1968 paper, L’avenir de l’ Université (The Future of the University), which is an optimistic view in spite of everything:

In spite of early failures [Nanterre] I continue to think that the university is a privileged location for leading the fight against bureaucracy, for sharing decision making and for inventing flexible new models of power in which spontaneity and the institution will be better balanced. (Ricœur 1971a, 73)

In the 1970s Ricœur was beginning to move beyond the hermeneutics of suspicion, gradually making his linguistic turn, which provides a more explicit focus upon the ethical responsibility that we have as language users. He incorporated into his philosophy the approach he adopted with students when possible: friendly discussion and reduction of the power differential, while at the same time being clear that the academic tutor, while knowing more than the student, needs to also learn a lot from the student (Ricœur 1968b, 381). He combined Kantian morality with Freudian hermeneutics so as to be able to believe that chaotic human instincts can become redemptive self-knowledge because of the principled and respectful way we can use language to search for truths.