Paul Ricoeur: Critical Consent of Logos to Life

Abstract

The central aim of the article is to make evident the critical relevance of consent in the framework of the phenomenological dialectics of the voluntary and the involuntary, according to Paul Ricoeur. Consent is the theoretical-practical form of knowledge, which aims at a fundamental alternative facing being, trough the absolutely involuntary, where the decision for existence is at stake. After analytically-existentially recovering the forms of necessity that hang upon human existence, to free them of their monist or dualist anthropological marginalization, the analysis aims at grasping them in their sense and thus bring them to the incarnated and broadened exercise of freedom. The theme is introduced by means of the confrontation between consent and creativity, for the latter has been repeatedly proposed by Ricoeur as central issue of the background of his thought. We start from the devaluation that the current concept of creativity would try to exercise upon the value of consent as expression of freedom. We answer back to the shallowness of that questioning, showing the critical conscience of consent, for freedom to appropriate itself creatively of the figures of the absolutely involuntary. In the very hard core of the absolutely involuntary, reflection bumps into the paradigm and the source of creativity: life itself as the sense of being. Finally, the rejection of the absolutely involuntary by a [form of] freedom that [vindicates] itself as abstract, the hyperbolic acceptance of necessity in orphism and the unilateral acceptance of necessity in stoicism are analysed, to discern what integral consent implies to creativity of life as expression of lógos. Summary: 1- The paradox of consent and creativity. 2- Consent and critical reason. 3- Topics of consent. 4- Life as lógos and paradigm of creativity. 5- From reversed to creative consent.