Subject:
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Center for Contemporary European Philosophy (CCEP) |
Organization:
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Leerstoel Praktische filosofie |
Journal title:
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International Journal of Philosophy and Theology
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Abstract:
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In the general introduction to the first part of his Philosophie de la Volonté, Le
volontaire et l’involontaire ([1950] 1966) Paul Ricoeur writes that the phenomenological
or ‘pure description […] of the Voluntary and the Involuntary’ is ‘constituted by
bracketing’ two things: first the fault, which is essentially a perversion of the pure
nature or the essence of human willing; and second ‘Transcendence which hides within
it the ultimate origin of subjectivity’. Evil, the condition of brokenness or the reality of
the fault, asks for an empirical description (and as Ricoeur will discover subsequently:
a hermeneutics) of concrete myths and symbols. He will remove this first bracketing in
the second part of his Philosophy of the Will and in the long ‘series of detours’ of his
hermeneutical writings. The second bracketing, however, will turn out to be much
more difficult to remove. It demands a ‘poetics’, which would threaten Ricoeur’s effort
to separate his Christian faith from his ‘autonomous’ philosophizing. In this article I
argue that Ricoeur eventually did present his poetics, though only in the epilogue to his
penultimate book ([2000] 2004) on ‘Difficult Forgiveness’. The article indicates why
this epilogue might fulfil the promise of a poetics, explains why this could only be
done in an epilogue and gives at least one possible reason why Ricoeur could write at
the end of his oeuvre, what he could not at its beginning.
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