"To speak, do, recount, impute are, by turns, the first analogon of the series of figures of acting, as a function of what Kant would have called an interest of reason that is different in each case. Speaking is the first analogon inasmuch as it is within a symbolic, hence verbal, setting that all other modalities of acting get determined. The philosophy of action is, in its analytic phase, a semantics of action sentences, and, in its reflective phase, an investigation of ways of speaking of oneself as an agent, ways of recognizing oneself verbally as the author of one’s own acts; narration is speaking par excellence, discourse and text; and moral imputation is spoken through the features of a special kind of attribution, an 'ascription' joining imputed action to the responsible agent.

However, doing can no less claim the role of the first analogon: 'Doing things with words' (to recall the well-known title of J. L. Austin's How to Do Things with Words). And recounting is doing, we must add, by conferring the coherence of a narrative on the cohesion of a life. This recounting, in turn, can also occupy the place of the first analogon once the question of the permanence of the self in time is brought forward, whether in the field of speaking and acting, or in that of the 'ascription' of acts to their agent.

Moral imputation, too, can be taken as the first analogon in the series of connotations of acting. What would the self-designation of a speaker signify if the sincerity of his or her saying were not assumed by the audience? Could an agent be taken to be the author of his/her acts if he did not declare himself of herself ready to be judged accountable for them before a tribunal of evaluation, of approbation, in short of moral judgment?

It is upon this analogy of acting, finally, that I try to graft an attempt to reappropriate the Aristotelian connotation of being as act and potentiality. I do not wish to conceal the difficult character of this reappropriation, more or less animated by the idea of taking this connotation of being as the first principle of a discourse about acting, one that finds articulations, on the level of a philosophical anthropology, that fit well with the style of a hermeneutic phenomenology. This reappropriation I am attempting is doubly difficult. It is so, first of all, because of the perplexities engendered by any archeological reading of the dunamis-energeia pair in Aristotle himself, whether it be a matter of the direct commentaries on Metaphysics A 12 and even more so O–the fragment 0 6 1048b 18-35 has especially fascinated me, just as it had drawn the attention of the best commentators before me, such as Remi Brague in his Aristote et la question du monde (Paris: P.U.F., 1988y-or if it be a question of the attempted reconstructions of the tie between the ontology of potentiality and act and the concept of praxis as it is set forth in the Nichomachean Ethics. Any reappropriation of this ontology of act and potentiality is made still more difficult by the detour) attempted before me by F. Volpi in his Heidegger e Aristotele and by Jacques Taminaux in his Lectures del (ontologie fondamentale, Essai sur Heidegger) through the Heideggerian concept of Care. This detour gives rise, in fact, to a problematic displacement due to the fact of being transferred from an ontology stemming from a preference for being as truth to one that accords priority to being as act and potentiality among the multiple connotations of being as being."

Ricoeur, P. (1996). From metaphysics to moral philosophy. Philosophy Today, 40(4), 443. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/205363795?accountid=28180

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