What Is a Post-Hegelian Kantian? The Case of Paul Ricoeur

Summary

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In opposition to "liberal exegetes" who "make of discourse on the last things a sort of more or less optional appendix to a theology of revelation centered on a notion of logos" (FLH, 404), Moltmann and his cohort read the New Testament in more eschatological terms.

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What Is a Post-Hegelian Kantian? The Case of Paul Ricoeur

One of the most popular ways to describe Paul Ricoeur's work is to say that he is a "postHegelian Kantian." Ricoeur himself embraced this label, and over the course of his career, he used it again and again to characterize his approach to philosophy.1 The label is clearly playful. But it also makes a serious point, and Ricoeur's readers have long recognized that it is a particularly valuable way of thinking about his work.2 At the same time, the label is a problematic one that raises a number of difficult questions. Just what is a post-Hegelian Kantian? Given the number and the severity of the disagreements between Kant and Hegel, does it even make sense to say that one is a disciple of both? How would one go about building on the heritage of both of these thinkers? How should one deal with the tensions that arise from doing so? There may be good reasons to apply this label to Ricoeur, but there is also an urgent need to explain its meaning and justify its use.

The aim of this essay is to shed some new light on what it means to say that Ricoeur is a post-Hegelian Kantian. I argue that Ricoeur's thought deserves this label because of its subject matter as well as its method. In other words, Ricoeur is a post-Hegelian Kantian not just in how he philosophizes, but in what he philosophizes about. More specifically, I argue that Ricoeur should be seen as a philosopher who is preoccupied with the three Kantian ideas-God, self, and world-but whose views of these topics learn from Hegel's critique of Kant while preserving Kant's core insights about them. I also try to show that Ricoeur's understanding of the self is a particularly clear example of what is involved in building on the work of both figures.

The rest of this essay falls into three parts. The first traces the origin and meaning of the term "post-Hegelian Kantian," and points out some problems with the ways in which Ricoeur's readers have understood it. The second section offers a somewhat different interpretation of the label, one that I illustrate by means of the ontology of selfhood Ricoeur develops in the tenth study of Oneself as Another. Finally, in the paper's third section, I draw some broader conclusions about what this interpretation shows about...

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