Abstract EN:

Talking about soul - today a word avoided and repressed - it is to throw in the specifity of man. One has to take it back, without shame nor fear, but also without depriving man of his permanent effort towards his own future. So, under which requirement could soul be understood, recognized in man's thought and historical action? the question is quite difficult to clarify but one must confront it. In this perspective, one had best avoid understanding man from the standpoint of dualistic problematics, go beyond the substantialist, monistic problematics or these of the psychosocial self-person, and rather reverse the problematics of the knowing subject focusing on the known object; one had best become aware of the problematics of existence, as a place of significance of every human reality : in the action of existing, there is like an original affirmation of the self, a persistance in being, a negativity, a presence. This last is principle of unity and principle of knowledge of all what falls within the province of man. Trying to understand human soul amounts to reasoning inevitably in terms of existence, by taking in account all what is at stake in a human existence, because the matter is a person, a spiritual self, as a function of sense and value : it is by the distinctive way he comes to terms with himself and assumes the world, jointly with the way the others come to terms with themselves and assume the world, that he becomes what he is : a person. Within existence, soul is this person coming to herself, this internal tension of mind and body which turns man into a human being, in his endless and conflicting effort to reach his own humanity. What then becomes, - that we detect in places of emergence of the person, where it is always the entirety of a destiny which is at stake, - is something of an enigma and of the mistery of man.