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In effect, Ricoeur sees human reality as characterized by a fundamental antinomy.²³ The elaboration of a philosophical anthropology, with the concept of fallibility as its starting point, leads directly to the idea, developed in Homme faillible, first volume of Finitude et culpabilité (1960), of the "non-coincidence of man with himself," the constitutive "disproportion" of the ego. The paradoxical ontology constituting man is that of a finite-infinite being, as theorized by Descartes in his Meditations, but reinterpreted so as to exclude any connection with faculty psychology and its theory of error (finite intellect, infinite will and, hence, possibility of error). One must rather turn to the beginning of the fourth Meditation, where man is seen as intermediary between the highest being and non-being, excluding, however, any spatial connotation from the notion of "intermediary'. "Man … is intermediate because he is a mixture, and a mixture because he brings about mediations. His ontological characteristic of being-intermediate consists precisely in that his act of existing is the very act of bringing about mediations between all the modalities and all the levels of reality within him and outside of him. That is why we shall not explain Descartes by Descartes, but by Kant, Hegel and Husserl: the intermediacy of man can only be discovered via the detour of the transcendental synthesis of the imagination, or by the dialectic between certainty and truth, or the dialectic of intention and intuition, of significance and presence, of the Verb and the Look"²⁴

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-0639-6_4

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