Le sens un peu oublié de la première entrée de Ricoeur en herméneutique

Abstract

In later, retrospective texts where he explained his hermeneutical turn, Paul Ricoeur claimed that it was due to the impossibility to know oneself directly, through introspection, and the necessity to undertake the detour of interpretation in self-knowledge. By going back to the first occurrences of this hermeneutical turn in his work of 1960, The Symbolism of Evil, this paper argues that other motives, which were later forgotten, were also at play and perhaps more instrumental, most notably the intention of salvaging modernity against itself and of curing it of its forgetfulness of the sacred.