Evil and sadness in Ricœur

The suffering of the righteous in the biblical book of Job

Abstract

This article deals with the problem of evil in Paul Ricœur. For the author, man is in the world and, as such, constantly susceptible to failure; he takes up the possibility of deception present in Descartes, in which man is in a constant tension between finite and infinite, and reads this same condition from Kant, Hegel and Husserl. From there, it is necessary to understand the meaning of this evil that man can commit and is faced with; to do so, he analyzes various symbolic levels present in the myths and narratives of human history, which manifest, in their respective periods, the thinking and understanding of world of certain people. For the author, only by understanding the symbolism of evil is it possible to have greater clarity about its consistency, especially from the point of view of confessed evil; in essence, he wants to understand through myths, which have extracts of meaning that precede the philosophical appropriation of evil, these more basic forms about the existence of evil and the human position towards it. Having understood what evil means and the human implication in the face of it, it is also necessary to understand that evil which exists in the world and which does not have a conscious or intentional origin. To this end, we will appropriate the biblical book of Job – which Ricoeur himself uses – to trace a path about the evil suffered.