A Companion to Ricoeur’s Freedom and Nature

257 Pages·2018·1.64 MB·English

by  Scott Davidson (ed.)

A Companion
to Ricoeur’s Freedom
and Nature

A Companion
to Ricoeur’s Freedom
and Nature
Edited by
Scott Davidson
LEXINGTON BOOKS
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Contents
Introduction: Freedom and Nature, Then and Now vii
Scott Davidson
PART I: HISTORICAL INFLUENCES 1
1 Ricoeur and Merleau-Ponty: From Perception to Action 3
Marc-Antoine Vallée
2 Act, Sign and Objectivity: Jean Nabert’s Influence on
the Ricoeurian Phenomenology of the Will 17
Jean-Luc Amalric
3 Ravaisson and Ricoeur on Habit 37
Jakub Čapek
4 The Influence of Aquinas’s Psychology and Cosmology on
Ricoeur’s Freedom and Nature 59
Michael Sohn
PART II: KEY THEMES 77
5 The Paradox of Attention: The Action of the Self upon Itself 79
Michael A. Johnson
6 The Status of the Subject in Ricoeur’s Phenomenology
of Decision 109
Johann Michel
v
vi Contents
7 Volo, ergo sum: Ricoeur Reading Maine de Biran on Effort and
Resistance, the Voluntary and the Involuntary 119
Eftichis Pirovolakis
8 On Habit 135
Grégori Jean
9 The Phenomenon of Life and Its Pathos 157
Scott Davidson
PART III: NEW TRAJECTORIES 173
10 A Descriptive Science of First-Person Experience: For an
Experiential Phenomenology 175
Natalie Depraz
11 Ricoeur’s Take on Embodied Cognition and Imagination:
Enactivism in Light of Freedom and Nature 191
Geoffrey Dierckxsens
12 Freedom and Resentment and Ricoeur: Toward a
Normative-Narrative Theory of Agency 207
Adam J. Graves
Index 227
About the Contributors 231
Introduction
Freedom and Nature, Then and Now
Scott Davidson
Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) was one of the leading intellectual figures in
French thought over the latter half of the twentieth century and continu-
ing into the twenty-first. Having published more than thirty books and five
hundred articles on a wide range of topics over the course of his lifetime,
the scope of his thought is quite remarkable. It is no exaggeration to say that
Ricoeur engaged in some way with most, if not all, of the major philosophical
movements and leading figures of his time. Consequently, there are as many
different points of entry to his thought as there are individual perspectives
and interests. Nonetheless, the most common way of presenting his oeuvre
has been to follow its development over the course of his career.1 And this
task usually commences with his book Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary
and the Involuntary,2 which stands out as his first truly original contribution
to philosophy.3
This Companion to Freedom and Nature is motivated by the realization
that Freedom and Nature has been discussed, for the most part, merely as
the starting point of a longer intellectual journey. As such, it is either treated
as the first installment of the completion of a three-volume Philosophy of the
Will4 or more generally as the first step along the course of Ricoeur’s distin-
guished career. Although each of those perspectives is justifiable, the unfor-
tunate result is that this book has rarely been approached on its own terms,
and consequently, many of the important details concerning its own content
and contribution have been either overlooked or ignored. In fact, in the pro-
cess of preparing this book, it has come as a great surprise for me personally
to discover just how little secondary research has been devoted directly to
Freedom and Nature. Up to this point, there are no other book-length studies
devoted exclusively to this work, and there are only a handful of articles that
have actually taken it up as a direct theme of reflection.5
vii
viii Introduction
Whatever may account for this neglect, it is clear that a distance has opened
up now between Freedom and Nature and its readers. Written almost seventy
years ago, readers today are far removed from the intellectual milieu in which
the book was written. Many of the thinkers engaged by Ricoeur have been
forgotten, and few, if any, of the scientific concepts that were in circulation
at that time are familiar nowadays. Such a distance, as Ricoeur’s later writ-
ings on hermeneutics serve to remind us, calls for the work of interpretation
inasmuch as the hermeneutic aim is to overcome the distance that separates
the reader from the author. And indeed, the chapters of this book seek, each
in its own respective way, to overcome the historical and conceptual distance
that separates Freedom and Nature from readers today.
But the fact of this historical distance does not only present an obstacle to
understanding, it also poses a threat to the validity of Ricoeur’s findings. To
the extent that Freedom and Nature engages directly with the philosophical
and scientific thought of its own time and to the extent that those ideas have
been surpassed, does it not follow, in turn, that the time has passed as well
for Freedom and Nature? Should it not be confined simply to the dustbin of
intellectual history? This critical concern makes it clear that the hermeneutic
task of leading the reader back to the author, albeit important, cannot be suf-
ficient. In addition to taking the reader back to the world of the author, the
work of interpretation should also point forward and follow the movement
that brings the author to the world of the reader. In this respect, the interpre-
tive task should be to help Ricoeur’s work speak to today’s world, so that the
reader may rediscover and affirm the contemporary relevance of Freedom
and Nature.
An “internal” motivation for returning to Freedom and Nature is explained
in Jean Greisch’s “Préface” to the 2009 French edition of the book (Greisch
2009). Greisch asserts that a careful reading of Freedom and Nature reveals
an underlying continuity in Ricoeur’s Philosophical Anthropology, to the
extent that this early book introduces a number of themes and concerns that
will resurface, “like an underground river,” in Ricoeur’s subsequent works
(Greisch 2009: 8). Clear examples of this point would include the distinction
between explanation and understanding, the mixed discourse of action, the
concept of imputation, the role of history, character, and temporality, among
others. The careful reader will thus find that many of the themes that emerge
centrally in Ricoeur’s subsequent writings are already introduced nascently in
Freedom and Nature. This way of reading Freedom and Nature can indeed
help readers to have a greater appreciation of the continuity in Ricoeur’s
philosophical work, but its drawback is that its significance is limited to the
extent that remains internal to Ricoeur’s oeuvre.
Yet, in my opinion, there is also a clear and compelling “external” moti-
vation for readers to return to Freedom and Nature today. In light of recent
Introduction ix
developments in phenomenology and the philosophy of mind, it could be
argued that Ricoeur’s book has at last found its audience. This is due in large
part to the fact that Ricoeur engages seriously with the empirical sciences to
inform his understanding of cognition and emphasizes the role of the body
in shaping our engagement with the world. In this way, Freedom and Nature
anticipates and resonates with a variety of recent attempts to link phenom-
enology with the natural sciences as well as to “embody” cognition. To build
the case that Freedom and Nature speaks directly to these contemporary
interests, I will connect the three major divisions of this book—Historical
Influences, Key Themes, and New Trajectories—to the interests of research-
ers working at the intersections between phenomenology, psychology, and
neuroscience.
NOTES ON THE COMPOSITION OF
FREEDOM AND NATURE
Before exploring the historical influences on Ricoeur’s thought, I first want
to situate the publication of Freedom and Nature within the historical context
of his own life and work. In his “Intellectual Autobiography,” Ricoeur says
that he already began his working notes for a three-volume book called a
Philosophy of the Will, while he was a prisoner of war in a German camp in
World War II. But in fact, some parts of Freedom and Nature—which was to
serve as the first volume of this book—can be traced back even earlier. His
treatment of attention, for instance, is based on research that was presented in
1939 under the title “L’attention: Etude phénoménologique de l’attention Et
de Ses Connexions Philosophiques” (“Attention: A Phenomenological Study
of Attention and its Philosophical Connections”).6 Ricoeur’s philosophical
career was interrupted by his call to serve in the French military later that
year. In June of 1940, however, he became a prisoner of war and would
remain there for almost five full years.7 For Ricoeur, this became a period
of forced leisure that was spent on the preparation of work that would be
published later. He sketched outlines and sections of Freedom and Nature
in his journals and on tiny scraps of paper. In 1943, he was able to procure a
German copy of Husserl’s Ideas I and then embarked on a careful study and
French translation of that book. Due to the lack of paper, his translation was
written in miniscule handwriting in the margins of the book. This was one of
the few items that he carried back home in his knapsack following the war,
and today it is held in the Fonds Ricoeur in Paris.
After returning from the war, Ricoeur resumed work on his doctorate,
which in those days required candidates to submit two separate works: one
a contribution to the history of philosophy and the other an original piece