Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary

by Paul Ricœur, Don Ihde (Foreword), Erazim V. Kohák (Translator)

Incredible originality of thought in areas as vast as phenomenology, religion, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, intersubjectivity, language, Marxism, and structuralism has made Paul Ricoeur one of the philosophical giants of the twentieth century. The way in which Ricoeur approaches these themes makes his works relevant to the reader today: he writes with honesty and depth of insight into the core of a problem, and his ability to mark for future thought the very path of philosophical inquiry is nearly unmatched. Freedom and Nature, the first part of Ricoeur's Philosophy of the Will, is an eidetics, carried out within carefully imposed phenomenological brackets. It seeks to deal with the essential structure of man's being-in-the-world, and so it suspends the distorting dimensions of existence, the bondage of passion, and the vision of innocence to which Ricoeur returns in his later writings. The result is a conception of man as an incarnate Cogito, which can make the polar unity of subject and object intelligible and provide a basic continuity for the various aspects of inquiry into man's being-in-the-world. This volume and the other new editions of Ricoeur's texts published by Northwestern University Press have joined the canon of contemporary continental philosophy and continue to contribute to emergent discussions in the twenty-first century.

Genres: Philosophy, Psychology

544 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1950

About the author

Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) is widely recognized as one of the most distinguished philosophers of the twentieth century. In the course of his long career he wrote on a broad range of issues. His books include a multi-volume project on the philosophy of the will: Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary (1950, Eng. tr. 1966), Fallible Man (1960, Eng. tr. 1967), and The Symbolism of Evil (1960, Eng. tr. 1970); a major study of Freud: Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (1965, Eng. tr. 1970); The Rule of Metaphor (1975, Eng. tr. 1977); Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (1976); the three-volume Time and Narrative (1983-85, Eng. tr. 1984–88); Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (1986); the published version of his Gifford lectures: Oneself as Another (1990, Eng. tr. 1992); Memory, History, Forgetting (2000, Eng. tr. 2004); and The Course of Recognition (2004, Eng. tr. 2005). In addition to his books, Ricoeur published more than 500 essays, many of which appear in collections in English: History and Truth (1955, Eng. tr. 1965); Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology (1967); The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics (1969, Eng. tr. 1974); Political and Social Essays (1974); Essays on Biblical Interpretation (1980); Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (1981); From Text to Action (1986, Eng. tr. 1991); Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination (1995); The Just (1995, Eng. tr. 2000); On Translation (2004, Eng. tr. 2004); and Reflections on the Just (2001, Eng. tr. 2007).

The major theme that unites his writings is that of a philosophical anthropology. This anthropology, which Ricoeur came to call an anthropology of the “capable human being,” aims to give an account of the fundamental capabilities and vulnerabilities that human beings display in the activities that make up their lives. Though the accent is always on the possibility of understanding the self as an agent responsible for its actions, Ricoeur consistently rejects any claim that the self is immediately transparent to itself or fully master of itself. Self-knowledge only comes through our relation to the world and our life with and among others in that world.

In the course of developing his anthropology, Ricoeur made a major methodological shift. His writings prior to 1960 were in the tradition of existential phenomenology. But during the 1960s Ricoeur concluded that properly to study human reality he had to combine phenomenological description with hermeneutic interpretation. For this hermeneutic phenomenology, whatever is intelligible is accessible to us in and through language and all deployments of language call for interpretation. Accordingly, “there is no self-understanding that is not mediated by signs, symbols, and texts; in the final analysis self-understanding coincides with the interpretation given to these mediating terms” (Oneself as Another, 15, translation corrected). This hermeneutic or linguistic turn did not require him to disavow the basic results of his earlier investigations. It did, however, lead him not only to revisit them but also to see more clearly their implications.

Reviews

[David M · Rating 5 out of 5]

This early work was Ricoeur's most concerted effort at straightforward phenomenology. After this, a shift from reflection to interpretation, from trying to know the subject directly to the long detour of symbols.

As I read it, this book is an attempt to make sense of nature from the perspective of freedom. Against the tendency to see them as locked in a zero-sum rivalry (a tendency perhaps best exemplified by Sartre), Ricoeur emphasizes the subtle interplay of the two. I especially enjoyed the discussion of pleasure and need, and the chapter titled "The Way of Consent."

*

M. Ricoeur, I believe, was a devout Christian, but direct references to his faith are extremely rare throughout his oeuvre. There are, however, these tantalizingly oblique suggestions that keep popping up. From Freedom and Nature:

"It is not accidental that unity of inspiration animates the great medieval cosmologies - it is a unique desire which starts with God and returns to God through all degrees of nature. This unity, lost as knowledge, must be discovered in some other way in the 'poetics' of the will." - pp. 425

Ricoeur is not trying to turn back the Enlightenment. He recognizes the achievements of science and the specialization of knowledge. When his faith appears it seems to take the form of eschatology - it suggests a limit towards which thought may tend but never surpass, not in this world anyway, not in these times.

[Kim Daly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dense, mais plein de concepts directement utilisables en analyse littéraire. Indispensable.

[Michael]

I've read bits and pieces of this over the years, and found it the best book on the will -- and on wonder -- but I finally finished it. I loved the Rilkean and Orphic, along with Stoic, ending.