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Sacred must be expanded and deepened, so that the faith options influencing hisphilosophical thought are brought to their proper explication in the depth of human existence,at a level below specific faith concerns.For Ricoeur, there is a certain continuity between hermeneutics of existence and aphilosophical reflection on religious existence that leads to the expression of the Sacredin symbols and myths, or to the place of evil and fallenness in human existence. Ricoeurmight well regret Heidegger’s too quick move to the ontological origins of theology andepistemology. In contrast to Heidegger, Ricoeur remains on the ontic level, perhapssometimes not heeding the need for its prior disclosure, which might well serve as a guidefor his own analyses of ontic dimensions of religious existence and of expressions andinterpretations of symbols and myths. Indeed, a prior ontological disclosure could providea beneficial preview for Ricoeur’s own ontic focus, allowing its reflection to transpirewithin a certain explicitly grasped, but still operative, element of his hermeneutic situation.It is one such element in Ricoeur’s view of ontic religious existence that needs furtherclarification. This is simply the other side of the required existential neutrality consideredabove.On this ontic level in an extended ethics, Ricoeur has focused pointedly upon theproblem of the place of evil in freedom within human existence, and upon the ontic relationof human existence to the Sacred that is central to his whole philosophy. It is thusthat for Ricoeur, when pausing to dwell on the ontic, this has fostered an epistemologyof interpretation beneath the subject-object disjunction and has allowed for an integrationor a dialectizing of the phenomenology of spirit with a psychoanalysis of desire, with theirrespective orientations to teleology and to archeology, both of which prepare for the relationto the Sacred within a phenomenology of religion and its eschatology. He has spentvast energies on the consideration of the conflict of interpretations in order to reveal whathe calls differing aspects of existence that ontically found various hermeneutic methods,as seen above. 19 For, although his pausing to reflect on the ontic level of existence andthe conflict of interpretation delays his ontology, the resolution of the conflict and therevelation of aspects of existence indicate the importance of considering the ontic levelfurther than Heidegger does.Yet, in spite of these serious advantages of proceeding via the long way to examineontical dimensions of human existence, Ricoeur’s hermeneutics seems to allow specificreligious content to enter into his own philosophical fore-comprehension of humanexistence, which leads him away from the existential neutrality required above. This issomething that has been seen to be corrected by means of a slight adjustment. To accommodatethe radicality implied in Heidegger’s approach, Ricoeur’s view of existence requiresan adjustment beyond the neutrality of existence that liberates human existence fromfallenness as its necessary constitution. There is a further need to explicate the faith optionwithin which much of his philosophy of existence is developed, in order to liberate existencephilosophically from its prejudice of a specific religious tradition. This traditionassumes the corruption at the heart of human existence, which is what gives too muchplay to radical evil as necessarily constitutive in existential freedom. The essential dimensionsof this were seen above, but the religious aspect needs to be explicitly dealt with.Perhaps by widening his initial hermeneutic situation to be somewhat broadened in thedirection of Heidegger, Ricoeur’s way becomes better attuned to a philosophically radicalizedapproach to the religious neutrality at the heart of human existence. Such an approachwould seek in the self’s responsiveness to the Sacred the enactment of freedom which un-19Ricoeur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” 13. These advantages of the “long way” militate againstthe Heideggerian “short way.” Ibid., 6, 10-11, 23-24.81