Semantics of Action III: On Ricoeur's approach on motivation and cause, his phenomenological approach on the voluntary and the involuntary, and his philosophy of capable human being

Why is it possible to reasonably ask ‘How do you loosen a screw?’ while it is not rea-sonable to ask ‘How do you raise your arm?’ For Ricoeur, the exercise of a capacity does not simply result from knowledge. In fact, I do not ‘know’ my body when I am acting: I am able to act; that is all. I am able to do it because ‘I can’. The corporal events ‘I know’ are not what ‘I do’. However, if a paralysed man were to ask the question ‘How do you raise your arm?’, it would have the same meaning and logical argumenta-tive justification of a proposition concerning objective knowledge (as ‘How do you loosen a screw?’), that is, the objects of the world, the techniques and the facts. Ricoeur recognises the validity of this point, connecting it to Merleau-Ponty’s thesis referring to the experience of the ‘I’ as ‘I can’, that is, as a phenomenological cornerstone of ‘my own body’. Within the order of action, power (pouvoir) is comparable to what the evi-dence is within the order of knowledge. Form one perspective, this reasoning puts into parallel the duality between the discourse about action and the discourse about move-ment with the natural and cultural dimensions of motivation and cause. Form another perspective, it focusses on the anthropological question concerning human nature. Do we have to reconsider human anthropology understanding action in connection with the themes of power and capacity? If so, what should be the anthropological and ontologi-cal fundament of such a new model? This paper tries to indicate the way for an integrate theory of the self able to coordinate and harmonise body and subjectivity, individuality and personhood.