Paul Ricoeur’s Philosophical Anthropology as Hermeneutics of Liberation: Freedom, Justice, and the Power of Imagination

This book offers a unique account of the role imagination plays in advancing the course of freedom’s actualization. It draws on Paul Ricoeur’s philosophical anthropology of the capable human being as the staging ground for an extended inquiry into the challenges of making freedom a reality within the history of humankind. This book locates the abilities we exercise as capable human beings at the heart of a sustained analysis and reflection on the place of the idea of justice in a hermeneutics for which every expectation regarding rights, liberties, and opportunities must be a hope for humanity as a whole. The vision of a reconciled humanity that for Ricoeur figures in a philosophy of the will provides an initial touchstone for a hermeneutics of liberation rooted in a philosophical anthropology for which the pathétique of human misery is its non- or pre-philosophical source. By setting the idea of the humanity in each of us against the backdrop of the necessity of preserving the tension between the space of our experiences and the horizons of our expectations, the book identifies the ethical and political dimensions of the idea of justice’s federating force with the imperative of respect. Paul Ricoeur’s Philosophical Anthropology as Hermeneutics of Liberation will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in hermeneutics, phenomenology, ethics, political theory, and aesthetics.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 Aesthetic Experience and the Wager of Imagination 2 The Poetics of the Will and a Philosophical Anthropology of the Capable Human Being 6 Summary Outline 9 1 Philosophical Anthropology, Poetics, and the Philosophy of the Will 15Poetics and the Philosophy of the Will 16 Intermediacy, Fallibility, Fault 18 Finitude and Infinitude 23 Transcendental Reflection 25 Metaphor and Metaphysics 29 2 The Practical Synthesis: Character, Happiness, and Respect 42Practical Synthesis 43 Practical Finitude 45 Happiness 53 Respect 57 3 Affective Fragility, Vulnerability, and the Capable Human Being 66The Restless Heart 67 Reason and Happiness 70 Fragility and Fallibility: Having, Power, Worth 74 viii Contents 4 The Wager of Imagination 89Ideology, Violence, and Power 90 An Eschatology of Nonviolence 94 Negative Dialectics and the Principle of Hope 97 The Temporalization of History 101 The Force of the Present and the Horizon of the Process of Freedom’s Actualization 103 5 Singularity, Exemplarity, Universality 114 Aesthetic Experience 114 Mimesis and Truth 117 Singularity, Exemplarity, Communicability 121 Reason, Judgment, and Imagination 126 6 Toward a Hermeneutics of Liberation 136The Idea of Humanity and the Aporia of the Oneness of Time 137 Exemplarity and the Hermeneutics of Testimony 142 The Imperative of Justice 149 7 Conclusions 160Conviction and Belief 163 Is Freedom Possible? 168 Hospitality and Justice 173 Bibliography 185 Index 193

About the Author :
Roger W. H. Savage is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, specializing in hermeneutics, aesthetics, and politics. He is the author of Hermeneutics and Music Criticism and Music, Time, and Its Other: Aesthetic Reflections on Finitude, Temporality, and Alterity. He has also edited two books on the work of Paul Ricoeur: Paul Ricoeur in the Age of Hermeneutical Reason: Poetics, Praxis, and Critique and Paul Ricoeur and the Lived Body.