THE DIALECTIC BETWEEN EXPLANATION AND UNDERSTANDING

Abstract

If i were to try to label the main thrust of Paul Ricoeur's work, I would suggest 'a philosophical anthropology'. This is a term he uses himself to describe his work. Just as importantly, it does justice to his lifelong interest in explaining and understanding human action. In his earliest original work, Freedom and Nature,1 he conceives of a kind of architectonic, composed of an 'eidetics' of the will, an 'empirics' of the will, and a 'poetics' of the will. The first would be a pure eidetic description, in the style of Husserl, of the fundamental concept of willing. The second would be a Kantian transcen dental argument for the logically necessary conditions for human evil to be possible. The second part of the 'empirics' of the will includes a hermeneutic account of the linguistic symbols of evil and the myths of the origin of evil which serve as the first-order explanations of evil. The third projected step in the trilogy was to be a phenomenology of hope and reconciliation and a solution to the paradox of transcendence and human freedom. I recently asked Paul Ricoeur if we would ever see the promised Poetics of the Will? He told me that either there would be no Poetics or that his work on metaphor and narrative constituted it. Then he asked me, 'Do you hold me to completing a plan I made when I was a very young man, some thirty-five years ago?' So what began as a carefully laid plan to answer some specific questions about human willing and freedom, about the nature and origin of evil, and about the reconciliation of transcen dence, gave way, little by little, to the demands of new questions and of new methodological resources. At the end of each of his major works, he lists the unanswered questions—or better, the new questions revealed by the investigation he has just completed. Thus, looking backwards, Ricoeur's work more resembles the unity of a journey than the completion of an architectonic drafted many years ago. Yet there is a constant theme of understanding human action— and he has added recently, human suffering—through the interpretation of texts. The main thrust of his effort has been to overcome Cartesian dualism and all of its vestiges. As his philosophical analyses progress, Ricoeur proposes alternative solutions to the Cartesian dichotomy between mind and