Sujeito, narrativa e capacidade : uma perspectiva renovada de formação humana a partir de Paul Ricoeur

Abstract

The study presented here is associated with Fundamentals of Education research line of the Post-Graduate Program in Education at the Universidade de Passo Fundo (UPF/RS) and intends to explore, supported by the concepts of subject, narrative, capacities, and social justice, a renovated notion of human formation, taking as a theoretical foundation Paul Ricoeur’s thought. We understand that thinking about such perspective demands, in contemporaneity, an approach that advances beyond a subjectivist and self-centered dimension of the subject, whose power to constitute oneself rests on oneself. In this respect, the question that orientates this thesis consists in understanding what notion of human formation — having the ideal of Bildung as a reference — can be postulated through the connection between the concepts of subject, narrative, capacities, and social justice in Paul Ricoeur. Our position suggests that a renovated and enlarged notion of formation demands an interconnection with an ethical perspective of the recognition of another, associated with the world and mediated by just institutions. Methodologically, the research is based on a qualitative perspective regarding the nature of the problem and a theoretical and bibliographical focus concerning the procedures. Epistemologically, our emphasis is on a hermeneutic perspective conceived beyond a lexicological method of interpreting texts, adopting this method as a vehicle for developing readings and understandings of oneself, of others, and of the world. The study is centered on the books Temps et Récit, Soi-Même comme autre, Écrits et conférences, Lectures, Le juste, and Parcours de la reconnaissance, by Ricoeur. Our understanding is that a conception of formation as self-formation, postulated according to Ricoeurian thought, is associated with the conditions and possibilities of development of human capacities, namely, the linguistic (speaking subject), phenomenological (agent subject), hermeneutic (narrator subject), and ethical (subject capable of moral imputation) spheres. Focusing on this comprehension, we intend to evidence the conception of subject presented in Ricoeur’s work based on the balance between an exalted subject (Descartes) and a humiliated subject (Nietzsche), in order to understand it as a self in the whole extension of this reflexive pronoun. Subsequently, we emphasize the particularity of the narrative capacity and its mediating function, which articulates the several capabilities that constitute the subject, in order to provide the attribution of a sense to the self to this idea of subject. In the last section of the argumentative path, we present what we understand as a renovated notion of human formation that finds its foundations in the development of capacities in both their individual and social dimensions. It is the conditions and possibilities of development of the capacities in all their directions that configure the narrative identity. It is the conditions and possibilities of development of the capacities in all their directions that configure the narrative identity. For this reason, we defend that Ricoeur understands that the capacities are crossed by all dimensions of acting and living, from the linguistic plane, to the phenomenological, hermeneutic, and to the ethical, to offer an enlarged notion of the self. Therefore, the subject, as a narrative elaboration, is the synthesis of a life path that is not made solitarily, but in mediation with another, with institutions and with the world of life, a formation that is always mediatized, relational and transitory, constantly woven from the social bond.