“The past is a cemetery of promises which have
Paul Ricoeur
not been kept.”
Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) was a French philosopher who contributed to combining phenomenological descriptions of human reality with hermeneutic interpretations. The way I experience something and the way I make sense of it influence each other and are interwoven into one whole. This thinking challenges mind/body dualism and brings our focus back to their integrated unity, for which we still lack proper contemporary concepts.
A critical example of the experience-meaning connection at work is our sense of identity. Who I am is a question we continuously answer throughout our lives, depending on our experiences and our interpretations of those experiences. In his 1991 essay Narrative Identity, Ricoeur examined the narrative constitution of identity, be it personal or community. He proposed it as a fundamental experience that integrates history and fiction into one story—that which is concerned with interpreting and understanding who we are.
Therefore, history – understood as a curated collection of past stories – matters today, as it shapes and informs our current interpretations and experiences. Since it is a curated collection, not all stories receive the spotlight, some are altered, others suppressed. Although the opening quote of this post might seem to suggest a bleak view of the past with perhaps some fatalistic undertones, Ricoeur was a hopeful thinker.
If the past is a cemetery of broken or neglected promises, we can revisit the past and bring the buried stories to life. Thus, by giving voice to the silenced, we can provide a future to the past and, at least to some extent and in a new rendering, deliver on those promises.
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Featured image credit: Landscape with the Colosseum and Arch of Constantine, Rome; Artist: Giovanni Paolo Panini, c.1692-1765; Oil on canvas; National Gallery of Ireland Collection, made available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.
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