Abstract

A fine translation makes available the work of an eminent European phenomenologist. Fallible Man is the first part of Finitude and Guilt, which is the second part of M. Ric£ur's Philosophy of the Will. In Fallible Man he makes brilliant use of Kant's notion of the transcendental imagination, calling into play Plato and Aristotle. Descartes' concepts of fault and transcendence, which remained opaque to the eidetic analysis of man in the first part of Philosophy of the Will, are analyzed in terms of "disproportion," in turn analyzed in terms of the "intermediacy" of man. Disproportion is a discrepancy between self aimed at and self attained, while intermediacy harks back to Kant's Schematism. The starting point on the way to his philosophical anthropology of fallibility is a transcendental analysis of perceptual receptivity, which he makes relevant to the structures of finitude and intermediacy. The abstractness of the transcendental approach is enriched by analyses of desire, character, person, feeling, and happiness, to overcome disparity between the conceptual and feeling. Yet incompleteness remains which is to be overcome by the "symbolics of evil" in the as yet unfinished Philosophy of the Will: with the concept of fallibility we arrive only at the possibility of evil. M. Ric£ur's line of argument is admirably clear-cut, his style lucid, and the sweep and balance of his thought impressive.—P. S.