The Young Ricœur and the Birth of the Spirit of Militancy

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between spiritual and philosophical research in Ricœur’s work, reconstructing and re-tracing the main stages of his youth formation and experience. The young thinker reveals him-self to be a young man at war with himself. The article confirms the close bond between spiritu-al-religious and philosophical-existential research. In addition, it shows an intrinsically militant matrix of Ricœur’s philosophical approach. Ricœur’s philosophy remains a perpetual dialectics precisely because the conflict between faith and reason, reflection and action does not find a fi-nal resolution and pacification.