Abstract

The theme of the historical experience of the finite man is what allows Paul Ricoeur to complete a long journey that, from the original agreement with a strictly eidetic phenomenology—through the analysis of the will and its sensible and corporeal instincts—leads him to a life’s hermeneutics that is firstly the understanding of “ontological deficiency”, as the basic trait of the human will’s being, of its passions, of its fallibility and continuous exposure to guilt. But Ricoeurian hermeneutics starts from the refusal of every abstract absolutism of the spirit and of its forms, as well as of a similarly abstract idea of the universal essence of the human. And it’s along this process that the further moving of perspective occurs towards the hermeneutics of a text, that becomes objective in the story and in its writing and, even more, in the world and in its stories.