Freedom And Nature: The Voluntary And The Involuntary

Paul Ricoeur Translated, with an Introduction by Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary Erazim V. Kohak NORTHWESTERN 1966 UNIVERSITY P R E S S Copyright © 1966 by Northwestern University Press Originally published in French under the title of Le et Vinvolontaire, Volontaire copyright © 1950 by Aubier Editions Montaigne. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 66-17011 MANUFACTURED I N THE U N I T E D STATES OF AMERICA A MONSIEUR GABRIEL MARCEL Hommage Respectueux See the sky. Is there no constellation called "Rider"? For this is strangely impressed on us: this earthy pride. And a second, who drives and holds it and whom it bears. Is not the sinewy nature of our being just like this, spurred on and then reined in? Track and turning. Yet at a touch, understanding. New open spaces. And the two are one. But are they? Or do both not mean the way they take together? Already table and pasture utterly divide them. Even the starry union is deceptive But let us now be glad a while to believe the figure. That's enough. —Rainer Maria Rilke * * From Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. M. D. Herter Norton (New York, W. W. Norton, 1942), p. 37. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION: The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur [i] T H E PHILOSOPHY OF THE W I L L I . Bibliographical Data Le Volontaire et Vinvolontaire, presented below as Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary, first appeared in Paris in 1950 as the first volume of Paul Ricoeur's La Philosophie de la volonte. As Ricoeur outlined the task in a paper concerning the application of phenomenology to the will, read before the International Colloquium on Phenomenology in Brussels the following year,1 the entire work was to consist of three volumes, the first devoted to the eidetics of the will, the second and third volumes dealing with empirics and poetics. The second volume was published in i960 under the title Finitude et culpabilite. It undertakes the projected task of empirics of the will in two parts. The first part, published separately as UHomme faillible (and, in English translation, as Fallible Man),2 still falls broadly within the limits of descriptive phenomenology. In contrast with the first volume, however, it is concerned with the existential possibilities of man's being: specifically, the possibility of evil. The second part, published the same year under the title La Symbolique du mal, continues the task of empirics of the will, but its focus is no longer possibility, but rather the experienced fact of evil as it is expressed in symbol and myth. This transition requires a basic change of methodology. While both earlier volumes employed a descriptive phenomenology to 1. "Les Methodes et taches de la phSnomenologie de la volonteY* in Les Problemes actuels de la phe'nome'nologie, ed. van Breda (Paris, 1952). 2. Trans. Charles Kelbley (Chicago, 1965). [xi] Xii / FREEDOM AND NATURE describe overt meanings, La Symbolique du mal, like the projected third volume, Poetics of the Will, must resort to a hermeneutic phenomenology of latent meanings. Ricoeur recognizes this problem in the Symbolique, and deals with it in detail in his most recent publication, De ['interpretation. This volume applies the basic insight of phenomenology of will to the question of meaning and its expression, thus resolving the methodological problems of the second volume of Philosophy of the Will and laying the groundwork for a future Poetics of the Will 2. Methodological and Terminological Data have received an enthusiastic reception among his students in France and America as well as among the few philosophers familiar with the terminology and conce