ABOUT LIFE AND NARRATION IN JEAN-PAUL SARTRE AND PAUL RICŒUR: A VIEW FROM THE PROBLEM OF THE MULTIVOCITY OF THE CONCEPT OF E

Abstract

In this text, initially will be presented the opposing perspectives of Jean-Paul Sartre and
Paul Ricœur on the relationship between living and narrating. If for Sartre, life and narrative are
incompatible, since the philosopher understands that narratives are mere falsifications of singular
experiences, for Ricœur, on the other hand, the experience has a previous structure that allows the
anchoring of narratives in life itself, what he called pre-narrative traits of actions. After this initial
clarification, this text also presents the hypothesis that this opposition between the two french
philosophers is due to the fact that both operate with different concepts of experience, because Sartre uses the concept derived from the philosophies of the cogito, a tradition that develops in
transcendental philosophy and culminates in phenomenology, while Ricœur, in turn, belongs to the
tradition that has its bases in hermeneutics, above all in Wilhelm Dilthey, for whom living experience
is expressed in a broader way than the mere relationship of a consciousness with its intentional object,
and it has significant developments in the thoughts of Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt. To
demonstrate this hypothesis, the distinction made by Benjamin between experience [Erfahrung] and
living [Erlebnis] will be fundamental, as well as the connection between memory and narrative in
Arendt, something that is also found in Benjamin. If this hypothesis is proved, it will be possible to
affirm that the two perspectives antagonize each other only in appearance, so that both philosophers
would be right about what they say about the relationship between experience and narratives, at the
same time, although not under the same aspect.