La conflictualité productive chez Ricœur

Deeper still than that of the differend, we find in Lyotard the concept of discrepancy, which underlines the welcome alterity in the encounter with others. We propose an understanding of Ricœurian anthropology based on this idea, when it is associated with another concept, that of ergodicity, which makes it possible to think the same in the discrepancy. We illustrate it with the trial and the act of judging. We then show that the Ricœurian process of putting rival thoughts into dialogue stems from this anthropology, and that Ricœur presents full coherence. For this, another concept is introduced which describes the mechanism of understanding always restarted, in the sense that each new thought must be able to be encompassed in the gaze cast on the world. Encompassing is a concept in modelling disciplines, which is difficult to translate into French. To illustrate this, we take as an example Ricœur’s “debate” with Jakobson in The Rule of Metaphor.