Paul Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007)
This is the English translation of the first volume of Ricoeur’s projected trilogy on philosophy of the will, originally published in French in 1950. While not his first book, Freedom and Nature is important as it sets forth his early thought on philosophical anthropology. The work is properly described as an eidetic phenomenology (after Husserl), an examination of human freedom which argues against both Cartesian dualism and Sartre’s existential dualism (being-for-itself and being-in-itself).
For Ricoeur, the “involuntary” (the range of motivations that drive our decisions, such as hunger and habit) is the negative condition of human freedom, and the interplay between these two aspects of personal existence forms a dialectic rather than a dichotomy, which over time develops (good) character. Thus, as the back cover blurb puts it, Freedom and Nature offers “a conception of man as an incarnate Cogito, which can make the polar unity of subject and object intelligible and provide a basic continuity for the various aspects of inquiry into man’s being-in-the-world.”
This is not, however, the best introduction to Ricoeur’s philosophical writings, which spanned more than half a century. For those interested in reading him for the first time I would recommend his Critique and Conviction (1995; ET 1998).
