Utopia: the political aesthetics of Paul Ricoeur

The aim of this article is to reveal the relevance of aesthetics in the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, with particular respect to the concept of utopia as presented in the Lectures published in 1986. Utopia is relevant to aesthetics at three levels. First, utopia is a literary genre and as such it shares with the artistic sphere some formal and content-related criteria. Second, utopia is an imaginative variation of reality, therefore it shares with fiction some transformative power with respect to ordinary experience. As works of fiction, utopias are always historical, singular, and creative, therefore resist sociological reduction. Third, Saint-Simon and especially Fourier's utopias put aesthetic life at the core of their reformation project, which allows Ricoeur to emphasize the role of passions in the good life. In Ricoeur's account, utopia, for its cognitive, ethical, political, and aesthetic aspects, results in an ambivalent construct that counters the modern tendence to separate and oppose science and art.