The aim of my project is to show that the political philosophy and political ethics of Paul Ricœur and Hannah Arendt are guided by the basic idea of the genuine sociality of human beings in an important way. From the outset, human beings find themselves in a field of “opennness” with the world and others.
By first taking up Paul Ricœur's engagement with the work of Hannah Arendt, I will show how their central concepts intersect in many ways, while also bringing out their differences. Arendt's thoughts on narrative and history, political action, the fragility of politics, political liberty, power, violence and political judgement have all influenced Ricœur's later works in many respects. Through a systematic approach, I will focus on the manner in which they employ phenomenological concepts, which, to name a few, include the following: the constitution of the public realm, political action and its ethical implications, storytelling, memory, the concept of judgement, responsibility and the initiative.
To put it generally, I will bring out the common ground between Arendt and Ricœur concerning political philosophy. To this end, it is necessary to consider their phenomenological approach not only towards the political and the anthropological, but also the historical embedding that frames the political and ethical concerns. The critical reference they make to Heidegger's ontology and the underlying Aristotelian ethics also needs to be taken into account. In particular, I shall refer to the spatial aspects of these considerations such that spatial terms are analysed in a substantial sense as well as in a metaphorical sense. An important task of this analysis is to identify the aspect of embeddedness of the acting subject within the public realm and its entanglement in a "web of human relationships". Another task consists in drawing out the significance of the bodily and ontologically anchored act of the initiative, which plays a crucial role in Ricœur's phenomenology of the capable men. The idea of political power being not only associated with domination and violence but primarily grounded on a common will to live together, is strongly influenced by Arendt's concept of power-in-common, which, in turn, is based on the condition of plurality and acting in concert. In accordance with Arendt's conception, this power-in-common has for Ricœur the character of the initiative – the fundamental capacity of a human being to begin an entirely new process of action by oneself.
The place of politics, constituted by political action and retrospectively manifested in narratives, is for both Arendt and Ricœur a place of the "disclosure of the who", in which the very identity of the acting and speaking subject is revealed.
Arendt and Ricœur both make clear that a profound understanding of our genuine sociality and an adequate dealing with the human condition can help preserve and actualise an active political realm for future generations, which are the conditions for the realisation of individual freedom and social peace.