"Testimony gives something to be interpreted"
About this Quote
Ricoeur’s line is almost perversely modest: testimony doesn’t deliver truth pre-packaged, it delivers material. Something. A deposit. That small phrasing quietly demotes the fantasy that a witness can hand over reality intact. In Ricoeur’s world, speech arrives already tangled in time, perspective, and motive, and the listener is never a neutral receptacle. Testimony is less a transmission than an invitation to interpret, which is also a warning: if you want certainty, don’t ask a human being to remember.
The intent here sits at the crossroads of hermeneutics (his lifelong project) and the ethics of belief. Testimony carries a claim and a vulnerability at once. It asks for trust, but it also demands scrutiny because it’s shaped by narrative form: what gets selected, what gets omitted, how the teller positions themselves as hero, victim, or bystander. “Gives something” sounds generous, but it also implies incompleteness. The witness provides fragments; meaning is co-produced by the interpreter, whose own frameworks, prejudices, and desires are part of the final story.
Context matters: Ricoeur writes in the shadow of the 20th century, when testimony became a moral and political category - think war crimes, Holocaust survivor accounts, truth commissions. These aren’t just “sources”; they’re events of speech where stakes include justice, memory, and communal identity. The subtext is bracing: we honor testimony not by treating it as untouchable, but by reading it responsibly, aware that interpretation is unavoidable and therefore ethically charged.
The intent here sits at the crossroads of hermeneutics (his lifelong project) and the ethics of belief. Testimony carries a claim and a vulnerability at once. It asks for trust, but it also demands scrutiny because it’s shaped by narrative form: what gets selected, what gets omitted, how the teller positions themselves as hero, victim, or bystander. “Gives something” sounds generous, but it also implies incompleteness. The witness provides fragments; meaning is co-produced by the interpreter, whose own frameworks, prejudices, and desires are part of the final story.
Context matters: Ricoeur writes in the shadow of the 20th century, when testimony became a moral and political category - think war crimes, Holocaust survivor accounts, truth commissions. These aren’t just “sources”; they’re events of speech where stakes include justice, memory, and communal identity. The subtext is bracing: we honor testimony not by treating it as untouchable, but by reading it responsibly, aware that interpretation is unavoidable and therefore ethically charged.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
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