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misunderstanding of the hermeneutic position to think that it implies some kind ofdeterminism and undermines the reality of human freedom.Freedom and necessity (le volontaire et l’involontaire, to allude to the title of one ofRicoeur’s early works) should not be viewed as metaphysical opposites. In actuality,eidetic, ideal-type analysis, by enabling us to realize what is “necessary” in human affairs,also, by the same token, enables us to realize what is genuinely possible. For, the utopian,revolutionist impulse notwithstanding, the not unhappy fact of the matter is that not justanything is possible at any moment. Since we are not pure consciousnesses fully awareof our motives and intentions, and thus fully in control of the meaning of what we do,there is a kind of objective logic or necessity at work in the various human lifeworlds.Through interpretation, it is possible to become reflexively aware of these logics -- but neverin such a way as to be able to change them, just in any way we please. Just as, in replyto Habermas, Gadamer argued against the possibility of a total critique of “tradition”while, at the same time, maintaining that there is no inherited presupposition that cannot,in a piecemeal sort of way, be subjected to critique and revision, so likewise, although thelogic of things is beyond the ability of humans deliberately to control, it is neverthelessalways possible, through the creative power of the imagination, to introduce into this orthat order of human behavior new structural/institutional constraints or incentives (in theeconomic sense of the term) which operate not in a moralistic (“subjectivistic”) waythrough an appeal to people’s “good intentions” but in a thoroughly praxial manner, bydirectly affecting people’s behavior. The same thing is true on the personal level. In bothinstances, social and personal, human freedom is the freedom to create new habits andnew constraints, thereby altering la force des choses and opening up new directions forour being-in-the-world. 150 As Merleau-Ponty pointed out in this regard, “Our freedomdoes not destroy our situation, but gears itself to it.” (PP, 442)Human freedom is never absolute, nor is it merely “necessity understood,” freelysubmitted to. Or again, for hermeneutics, human freedom is not the libertarian or anarchic(criterionless, unprincipled) freedom extolled by some poststructuralists (la liberté sauvage),pure, unconstrained spontaneity. Human freedom is a function of the ability humans have,as beings who have the logos (language/reason), 151 of intervening judiciously in thecourse of events by interpreting necessity in a transformative way, thereby, on occasion,by means of a certain “power of initiative,” as Merleau-Ponty called it (PP, 439), bringingabout new beginnings. The “gift of freedom,” as Arendt observed, is “the mental endowmentwe have for beginning something new, of which we know that it could just as well notbe.” 152The crucial thing is that we exercise our limited freedom in a reflexively enlightenedway. 153 As Heidegger said, in response to Marx’s saying that philosophers have only150See in this regard James’s superb chapter on habit, in The Principles of Psychology.151Cf. Merleau-Ponty: “We are born into reason as into language.” (SNS, 3)152Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 2:195.153In this regard, it should be noted that the dynamics of social orders can be, and often are,transformed or “short-circuited” in a totally unintended manner by human agents. By acting on what isseemingly predictable, given the dynamics of a given state-of-affairs, humans can, by that very fact, alterthe course of events in unanticipated ways. Predicting the behavior of the stock market, for instance, cansignificantly affect what that behavior turns out to be. This has to do with what financier-philosopherGeorge Soros calls the “reflexivity” of human behavior (George Soros, Soros on Soros: Staying Aheadof the Curve [New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1995], 72, 209-220), a phenomenon that Ricoeur also talksabout under the heading of the “self-fulfilling prophecy” (Ricoeur, Main Trends in Philosophy, 147-48).From a hermeneutic point of view, this is an extremely interesting phenomenon, in that it highlights anessential difference between the human order of symbolic interaction and the natural order of deterministiccause and effect.45