Ricoeur By Karl Simms Flashcards
In a nutshell, what was Ricoeur saying in his works in the 1950s on Philosophy of Will?
In his Philosophy of Will works during the 1950s, particularly Freedom and Nature (1950) and Fallible Man (1960), Ricoeur explored human freedom, agency, and the limits imposed by embodiment. He argued that human will exists in tension between voluntary and involuntary aspects, meaning that while we seek autonomy, we are shaped by biological, psychological, and social constraints. This leads to an inherent ‘fallibility’—a tendency toward both self-determination and ethical failure. Ricoeur synthesized phenomenology, existentialism, and hermeneutics to examine this paradox, laying the foundation for his later work on narrative identity.
Who was Ricoeur responding to here?
Ricoeur engaged with several philosophical traditions and thinkers: (1) Edmund Husserl—adopting phenomenology but emphasizing constraints on freedom; (2) Gabriel Marcel—influenced by his existentialist-Christian focus on human limitation; (3) Jean-Paul Sartre—critiquing his idea of radical freedom by stressing the involuntary aspects of will; (4) Maurice Merleau-Ponty—building on his notion of embodiment; (5) Immanuel Kant—modifying his view of autonomy by integrating human fallibility; and (6) Sigmund Freud—anticipating engagement with unconscious influences. Ricoeur positioned himself between existentialism, phenomenology, and moral philosophy to develop a nuanced view of human will.
How might one relate this to the natural sciences?
Ricoeur’s ideas can be related to natural sciences in several ways: (1) Neuroscience—his voluntary/involuntary distinction parallels studies on unconscious neural processes shaping decision-making; (2) Psychology & Cognitive Science—his emphasis on fallibility aligns with research on cognitive biases and bounded rationality; (3) Evolutionary Biology—his view of human agency as constrained by embodiment resonates with embodied cognition and adaptive heuristics; (4) Psychoanalysis—his work anticipated modern understandings of implicit cognition; and (5) Complex Systems—his account of decision-making as neither deterministic nor wholly free aligns with models of emergent behavior in complex systems. Ricoeur’s work fosters dialogue between humanities and science, rather than reducing one to the other.
What was Ricouer doing in comparing hermeneutics to psycholanalysis?
Why does R think hermen comes out of phenomenology?
What is ontology of understanding?
Why is psychoanalysis a historical science according to R?
What is ricoeurs view of metaphor
SUMMARY
For Ricoeur, metaphor works not at the level of individual words, but at the level of the sentence. It works not by substituting one ‘deviant’ term for another ‘proper’ term, but by the interaction between the ‘focus’ (‘a lion’, and the ‘frame’ (‘Achilles’) within the context of the whole sentence (‘Achilles is a lion.’). This entails three tensions: between the focus and the frame, between the literal and the metaphoric meanings, and within the word ‘is’, which in metaphor also contains the meaning ‘is not’. This last tension is important because it is the route to metaphorical truth, which is a way of seeing something as something. This seeing something in a certain way sheds new light on the world, and so increases human knowledge. But it only does so as a result of a hermeneutic process on the part of the reader of the metaphor. Metaphor is that part of language that invites interpretation, and thus invites us to do hermeneutics. (For that reason, poetic language, being the most metaphorical, is the language closest to human truth, which is phenomenological truth - the place where the objective truth of the external world and the subjective truth of the reader meet.) We should therefore not be alarmed if certain philosophers show all language to be inherently metaphorical, since such an insight depends on the kind of metaphors involved being dead ones, whereas Ricoeur’s is a philosophy of living metaphor: it is the creation of new metaphor which not only keeps language alive, but which vivifies human thought through its compulsion to exercise the imagination in an interpretative manner.
