Being as Act and Potency in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur

Abstract

The claim that being has the significance of both actuality and potentiality has been a persistent theme in Paul Ricoeur's philosophy from his early Poetics of the Will, through his investigations into the semantic innovation of metaphor and narrative, until his most recent work on the hermeneutics of the self. Initially, it was a matter of accounting for the primordial mediation of freedom by nature. Ricoeur needed a way of responding to the Sartrean position that subjectivity is a nothingness beyond being, and he found it in the classical notion that being is act before it is essence, that it is effort before it is inert presence. Later, Ricoeur's exploration of the phenomenon of semantic innovation led him again to a dynamic conception of being, one that does not make the mistake of equating the real with the empirically verifiable. Poetry and fiction intend being, not as given, as possible. Most recently, in working out the ontology required by the hermeneutics of the self set forth in Oneself as Another, Ricoeur once again has recourse to a ground of being at once potential and actual. What unites these three stages along the way of Ricoeur's philosophy, despite their difference in method and subject-matter, is the deep conviction that being is active and dynamic, that it does not stand aloof from activity is something in which the being can creatively participate. and The first stage on the road toward a recovery of the sense of being as actuality and potentiality occurs in Ricoeur's early attempt (in the 1950s and '60s) to rethink the primordial mediation of freedom by nature. Although the most important work on this topic during this period is no doubt and (1950), I would like to proceed by examining the lesser known essay, Nature and Freedom (1962), where Ricoeur addresses the question of whether it is still permissible to speak of human today.' He approaches the question by following two routes. First, he undertakes a regressive and reductive analysis in which freedom is increasingly set in opposition to nature, and then he sets forth a progressive synthesis in which freedom is brought into a new relationship with nature. From a denial of nature, therefore, we move toward a new affirmation of the nature within us. Along the way, Ricoeur offers some very revealing comments regarding his conception of being. The first moment in the destruction of nature, which corresponds roughly to the classical tradition, consists of the threefold conquest of the institution, the tool, and (NF 24/126). In comparison to the institution (or law, nomos), nature appears in the sense of the state of nature before any law or civilization. It is the reign of violence and disorder. Technology and art represent the second aspect of humanity's conquest of nature. Recalling Book 2 of Aristotle's Physics, Ricoeur observes that the analysis of tools reveals the essential difference between those things that exist by nature (phusei) and those things that exist by art (techne) (192b9-24). Here nature no longer signifies disorder and Ricoeur says, but spontaneity in the coming into existence, production according to an internal principle (NF 25/126). The third aspect of humanity's conquest of nature is language (logos). The world of signs sets up nature as a pre-existing order of mute expressions and brute appearances, thus creating a division between things that are said (discourse) and things that simply are (nature) (NF 25/126). We have thus moved from nature as a state of violence, as spontaneity in living things, to the mute existence of brute things. In each of these aspects (institutions, technology, and language), freedom asserts its separation from, and opposition to, the state of pure nature. In spite of this initial opposition, however, the break between nature and existence in the classical tradition was not total. …