Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary

Le Volontaire et l'involontaire, presented below as Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary, first appeared in Paris in 1950 as the first volume of Paul Ricoeur's La Philosphie de la volonte`. As Ricouer outlined the task in a paper concerning the application of phenomenology to the will, read before the International Colloquium on phenomenology in Brussels the following year, the entire work as to consist of three volumes, the first devoted to the eidetics of the will, the second and third volumes dealing with empirics and poetics. The second volume was published in 1960 under the title Finitude et culpabilite`. It undertakes the projected task of empirics of the will in two parts. The first part, published separately as L'Homme faillible (and, in English translation, as Fallible man), still falls broadly within the limits of description phenomenology. In contrast with the first volume, however, it is concerned with the existential possibilities of man's being: specifically, the possibility of evil. The second part, published the same year under the title La Symbolique du mal, continues the task of empirics of the will, but its focus is no longer possibility, but rather the experiences fact of evil as it is expressed in symbol and myth