ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to answer the question of the voluntary or involuntary nature of habits from the perspective of Paul Ricoeur’s eidetic phenomenology. Ricoeur’s thought gives us the basis for thinking about habits and their bivalent structure from the resources of his phenomenology of the will. However, by affirming the dichotomous and paradoxical character of habits, this perspective seems far from answering the question of whether it is freedom or automatism that would constitute the foundation of habit. This chapter shows that a paradox arises at the intersection of the ontological and phenomenological perspectives. But the methodological sense of Ricoeur’s eidetic phenomenology allows us to give a clear answer to this question, since it places us in the first-person perspective where it is the voluntary nature of human being that constitutes the basis for any action.
