Abstract

Le Volontaire et l’Involontaire was published in 1950, as the first volume of Ricoeur’s La Philosophie de la Volonté. The whole project has a sweeping range, reflected even in this first volume. It is a philosophy of the will, taking in analysis of concepts of behaviour with a critique of scientific psychology: analysis of our moral experience: of our attitudes to our life and to the whole of reality: of our experience of evil and guilt and our dreams of innocence and hopes of salvation. In the first volume Ricoeur imposes not only phenomenological brackets, examining our experience ‘descriptively’ and not causally, but also eidetic brackets, examining possible behaviour and not actual behaviour. This means that he suspends consideration of ‘the fault’, our experience of evil. This is left to the second volume Finitude et Culpabilité which in two parts, L’Homme Faillible and La Symbolique du Mal analyses the experience of evil, the latter part in a hermeneutic analysis of myth, a subject with which Ricoeur has come to the forefront of recent structuralist debate in his book De l’Interprétation A third volume of the Philosophy of the Will will deal with hermeneutic analysis of ‘transcendence’—of the dream of innocence, the hope of deliverance from evil, as expressed in poetry and myth.