On Paul Ricoeur's Concept of Responsibility

The Problem of Responsibility, which Ricoeur treated in its works ever so often, appears in the context of a phenomenological and hermeneutical reflection on the Self as an acting, suffering and capable Subject, which is not only responsible for its actions but also has to fulfill certain obligations toward others, toward the community and future generations. A characteristic of Ricoeur's hermeneutics of the ''capable man'' (l'homme capable) is that it brings up for discussion the problem of responsibility on several levels - historical, psychological, ethical, political and legal. These levels form different dimensions of the will, which must be brought from splintering back into a unit, so as to be able to understand the responsibility as an integral whole. The main goal of the contribution is to reconstruct this integrality and to show that Ricoeur's concept of Responsibility is implicitly temporally conceived and thus presupposes a responsibility, which binds our current existence and co-existence both to the past and to the future, and respectively to future generations.