Toward a Poetics of Freedom

This interpretive analysis of Paul Ricoeur reorients his later works on metaphor and hermeneutics towards the concerns that dominated the philosophy of the will of his earlier career in order to establish a composite discourse, the poetics of freedom. This study of Ricoeur¿s philosophy of being occurs in discourse with a poetic text, Dante¿s "Commedia". The correlations that arise between its aesthetic discourse and Ricoeur¿s contemporary perspective illuminate what Dr. Jenna Brooke Sunkenberg considers to be at the core of the philosophy of being: a primordial tension of selfhood conceptualized in terms of the dialectical relations that arise between freedom and nature, between objectivity and subjectivity, and between perspective and meaning; or in Dante¿s terms, between my life and la nostra vita.