Paul Ricœur

They will actually feel backward, quaint, sincere.

Maybe people would almost kind of confuse them as just being naive or But it's like what Paul Ricoeur called a second naivete.

It's the naivete that comes, I think even Malcolm Gite recently was talking about, I heard him say, use the term informed naivete.

So it's, I've gone through all of the stuff.

And we basically, in that way, in that kind of Freudian reductionism, we completely destroy the meaning of the image of the Virgin Mary in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Freudian hermeneutics is relentlessly a hermeneutics of suspicion, as Paul Ricoeur would call it.

Whereas Jung's is much more a hermeneutics of faith.

Again, that's Ricoeur's term.

And so their character is meaning something quite similar to what it will mean in Aristotle as a kind of effectively an ethical concept.

someone like Paul Ricoeur will say very interesting things about in the 20th century.

And what I suppose that I want to push on is that yes, it's definitely going to be true that the legal person is, you know, understanding the structure of the legal form is going to be central for any understanding of society.

But I think that a failure to think of our entry to social relations as not essentially a legal action, but one of performance.

So he takes on the persona of Sergeant John Keel.

um and he has he's sort of ushered um in this process by the history monks who are one of my favorite characters so there's a the so in the world of the disc world there is a a religious order of history monks and whose job it is to make sure that history occurs not that anything in particular happens but just that history occurs which i love and um In fact, while I was at university studying history, I wrote my thesis on the way on time and narrative by Paul Ricoeur, which is the theory that history is propelled through narrative and created through narrative.

And Terry Pratchett's books, this one and also Thief of Time, were hugely influential on my thinking and also not being funny, but they are way easier to understand than abstruse French philosophers.

Sorry, Paul Ricoeur.

Yeah.

So it's just marvellous.

But the, one of the things that struck me as a sort of, um, a clear example of what I think is the impact of reading is, um, the story of the final, I think Frances, I think I put her at the end.

Um, her description of how reading, um, allowed her to move out of her original, the little town in which she was born, uh, struck me as really a very good example of, um, the idea of, uh, that Paul Ricoeur, uh, writes about when he says that, you know, when, when readers have understood and loved a text, they have a world and not just a situation.

And, and her story and several of the other stories I think, um, show that, that you, you are, uh, thrust into an imaginative world that allows you to see your surroundings and yourself in a different way.

So you're removed from your immediate situation in your imagination, but then also that sometimes leads to physical, geographical, social, you know, social movement or, or, uh, well, including social mobility, right? But also in th- in this case, she moves, she leaves her town, and she goes abroad to look for, for, um, different ways or different, uh, opportunities that she didn't have in her, in her small town because there was only one way of being a woman over there, right? So she, she leaves and becomes something else.