Abstract

This article is about Paul Ricoeur’s insights in relation to the search of the orientation and perspectives about who we are. First, it gives some features about the philosopher’s reflexive trait where is highlighted the presence of the topic in regards of the individual endeavors that constitute each person as the master of his/her own actions and not an object of any circumstance. Then, it reviews the person’s phenomenological portrait according to the perspectives in a time of reasoning in which Ricoeur separates components and elaborates relations and inferences about the agent and his works, in which he manifests the exercise of his powers, capacities that are always interrogatives and answers where a third person is found. The philosopher phenomenologist battled the closemindedness, solipsism and monologues. Ricoeur continues with a hermeneutical immersion and delivers his most important work Oneself as Another. Here, we encounter against his third trait of answer about the person but without any disconnection about what was previously discussed, enlarging constantly and better comprehending his way of thinking. The person is constituted starting by the fact of being the substance of what we talk or write, keeps going by becoming the holder of his/her actions and carries on through the acknowledgements, the own and interpersonal. Is about the hermeneutics of Yes, it is a Yes that must act. Under what conditions should do it? The answers come in the practical hermeneutics or applied philosophy, where is diligently developed the sediments of its ethical triad. The desire of a happy and fulfilled life, with and for the others, in fair institutions. That is not an easy task, at least not always, because there are situations that make it difficult. It is because of these circumstances that Ricoeur built his posterior ethics or practical wisdom.