THE CONCEPTION OF SYMBOL IN MIRCEA ELIADE AND PAUL RICOEUR AND RELIGION

Abstract

This article aims to stand the concept of symbol as an epistemological paradigm of systematization of thought, from two perspectives: that of Mircea Eliade and that of Paul Ricoeur. Both thinkers, through different perspectives, link the symbol to religion. The historian of religions Eliade conceives symbol as linked to the sacred, marked by an ontological dimension, as homo religiosus, from the homo significans that characterizes the homo symbolicus. The symbol is thus seen as a source of meaning that prolongs the hierophany or replaces it; it reveals a sacred or cosmological reality not made possible by any other manifestation. The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur conceives the symbol from its double meaning: the apparent and the hidden meaning. For him, the symbol implies an analysis of language in which the significance closely linked to the symbol is in the interpretation, in the articulation of the linguistic and the non-linguistic, of language and lived experience. From Ricoeur, symbol involves the irreplaceable language of the domain of experience, which he calls the experience of confession. The symbol is the starting point of his hermeneutical practice. We will see, by an analytical method, that while the French philosopher brings out clearly his analytical particularity in relation to the symbol in the predominance of anthropology, the historian of religions conceives homo religiosus open to the symbol, this being the means of the exercise of his transcendence. Therefore, in different ways, with their conception of symbol, both collaborate in understanding religion.