Print Price: $104.50

Format:
Hardback
244 pp.
1 halftone, 239 mm x 160 mm

ISBN-13:
9780195182569

Publication date:
July 2005

Imprint: OUP US

Moral Creativity

Paul Ricoeur and the Poetics of Possibility

John Wall

Series : AAR Reflection and Theory in the Study of Religion Series

In Moral Creativity, John Wall argues that moral life and thought are inherently and radically creative. Human beings are called by their own primordially created depths to exceed historical evil and tragedy through the ongoing creative transformation of their world. This thesis challenges ancient Greek and biblical separations of ethics and poetic image-making, as well as contemporary conceptions of moral life as grounded in abstract principles or preconstituted traditions. Taking as his point of departure the poetics of the will of Paul Ricoeur, and ranging widely into critical conversations with Continental, narrative, feminist, and liberationist ethics, Wall uncovers the profound senses in which moral practice and thought involve tension, catharsis, excess, and renewal. In the process, he draws new connections between sin and tragedy, practice and poetics, and morality and myth. Rather than proposing a complete ethics, Moral Creativity is a meta-ethical work investigating the creative capability as part of what it means, morally, to be human. This capability is explored around four dimensions of ontology, teleology, deontology, and social practice. In each case, Wall examines a traditional perspective on the relation of ethics to poetics, critiques it using resources from contemporary phenomenology, and develops a conception of a more original poetics of moral life. In the end, moral creativity is a human capability for inhabiting tensions among others and in social systems and, in the image of a Creator, creating together an ever more radically inclusive moral world.

Reviews

• "A provocative primer rich and thoughtful in current phenomenological conversations related to major questions debated today." --Horizons
• "Paul Ricoeur is one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th and now 21st centuries. In this lively book, John Wall engages Ricoeur's work, especially the 'poetics of the will,' and, just as importantly, advances an account of the moral life as inherently creative. Wall insightfully addresses major debates within current ethics and deftly demonstrates the significance of "moral creativity" for providing a depiction of human life appropriate for the current situation. Anyone interested in contemporary moral thought as well as Ricoeur's philosophy will be instructed and challenged by this important volume." --William Schweiker, author of Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics: In the Time of Many Worlds
• "John Wall's Moral Creativity is a thoughtfully written, carefully researched, and insightful book that makes an original contribution to religious ethics through a critical reading of the work of Paul Ricoeur. Wall successfully crafts a poetic moral philosophy in relation to the narratological and tragic dimensions of human existence. Through careful and sensitive readings of important Continental and postmodern thinkers, Wall calls the reader to create a narrative unity of life amidst the complexities and incommensurabilities of daily, lived existence. A stunning achievement and must read for students and scholars interested in the moral life in the face of radical evil and the loss of hope in our time." Mark I. Wallace, author of Finding God In The Singing River: Christianity, Spirit, Nature and The Second Naiveté: Barth, Ricoeur and the New Yale Theology
• "John Wall is dealing here with one of the most urgent philosophical questions of our time. He manages to combine a lively, anecdotal, engaging syle with a lucid sense of argument and a wide range of scholarly reference. Ricoeur is his guiding spirit but by no means an exclusive one. This is much more then a critical monograph or missionary declaration of intent. It is a deeply reflective, personally engaged, intellectually robust journey into the very meaning of 'creativity' in its cultural, ontological, aesthetic and ethical dimensions.-- Richard Kearney, author of The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion and On Paul Ricoeur: The Owl of Minerva