Csoda, tévelygés, rejtély. Ricoeur gondolatai a szexualitásról
Miracle, Wandering, Enigma. Ricoeur’s Thoughts on Sexuality

Summary/Abstract: The text of Ricoeur (La merveille, l’errance, l’énigme) presented and analysed in this paper was written as an introduction to an issue of the journal Esprit, which deals with sexuality (La Sexualité. November 1960). It was later published in the volume Histoire et vérité (under the title “Sexualité, la merveille, l’errance, l’énigme”). The issue of the journal offers an inquiry into sexuality, and the editors’ goal was to not bypass any of the difficulties that make human existence problematic as a sexual existence. Gender difference crosses humanity differently from racial or social difference and different from spiritual difference. The authors examine what this means. The scientist, the philosopher, the literary critic, the ordinary man speak. As far as Ricoeur is concerned, in the introduction to this collective work, he attempts to allow the most obvious points of our astonishment at the mystery of sexuality to appear. Ricoeur follows a very subjective order: starting from what, to him, is the miracle of sexuality, he arrives at what to him is a mystery, passing through what makes sexuality wandering and aberrant. Meanwhile, he examines two paths of sexuality: tenderness and eroticism. Ricoeur’s conclusion is that sexuality proves impervious to reflection and remains inaccessible to human domination. Perhaps because of this opacity, neither the ethics of tenderness nor the non-ethics of eroticism can contain it, it can only be represented symbolically. The mystery of sexuality lies in the fact that it cannot be reduced to the trilogy that defines man: the language‒tool‒institution trilogy.

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