Gurevich, P. S. Paul Ricoeur About Man’s World of Spirit

Abstract: Discussions about man’s spiritual world hold a high position in Paul Ricoeur’s works on philosophy. The philosopher associates the phenomenon of spirituality with the problem of man’s subjectivity. He appeals to the analysis of man’s passions and free will as the source of man’s actions. The immanence of passions, according to the author, shows itself when it is a full element of the free will. Paul Ricoeur is concerned about applying the method of hermeneutic analysis to studying pre-reflective forms of social and cultural life. He also touches upon the problem of ambivalent feelings that man may experience. Ricoeur distinguish between sign and symbol and underlines that the symbol does not only point out at an item. Symbol reveals the hidden meaning too, and the meaning of symbol has a spiritual interpretation. The author of the present article uses the hermeneutic method in his research. At the same time, the author takes into account the phenomenological method as well. The author further develops the idea of reflexive philosophy, finds out the dependence of reflexive philosophy on Husserl phenomenology and offers the hermeneutic variant of this phenomenology. The novelty of this research article is the author’s attempt to carry out a new analysis of the phenomenon of spirituality in Paul Ricoeur’s works. The problem under review relates to the pre-reflective forms of social and cultural life. The author of the research article establishes that these are the forms of social and cultural life when the first seeds of spirituality are being born. Based on that assumption, the author compares sign and symbol and describes the ambivalent nature of man’s feelings. Special attention is paid to man’s passions as the expression of truly human features.

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