thought,” is a highly nuanced negative reply. Beyond the detour, he wants reflection to be
“a creative interpretation of meaning, faithfulto the gift of meaning from the symbol, and
faithful also to the philosopher's oath to seek understanding.” Reflection needs what the
symbol gives. “There is no philosophy without presuppositionsBut what the symbol gives
rise to is thinking. After the gift, positingIt is this articulation of thought given to itself in
the realm of symbols and of thought positing and thinking that constitutes the critical
point of our whole enterprise” (1967, 348–49).
Ricoeur seeks “a revivification of philosophy through contact with the fundamental
symbols of consciousnessIn short, it is by interpreting that we can hear again.” But we
do so in a hermeneutical circle in which “we must believe in order to understand.” But
the philosopher as such is not the believing soul, and the reflection of which Ricoeur
speaks is not theology. So just what is the nature of this necessarily presupposed
“belief”? We have just heard it described as “contact” and as “hearing again.” Ricoeur
gives several other accounts. For example, “The interpreter does not get near to what his
text says unless he lives in the aura of the meaning he is inquiring after.” Or again,
quoting Bultmann, “The presupposition of all understanding is the vital relation of the
interpreter to the things about which the text speaks directly or indirectly.” What is
required is “a kinship of thought with what the life [embodied in the work being
interpreted] aims at—in short, of thought with the thing which is in question” (1967,
351–52).
None of this language signifies the belief of the believing soul. But even this very weak
“belief” that enables the phenomenologist to understand signifies a hermeneutical circle
that must be transcended by reflection. Awareness of the need for the detour and of the
circle it involves “is to instigate [the philosopher] to think with the symbols as a starting-
point, and no longer in the symbols.” I get beyond this starting point and the
hermeneutical circle it involves by making a wager. “I wager that I shall have a better
understanding of man and of the bond between the being of man and the being of all
beings if I follow the indication of symbolic thought.” The task, then, is to verify that
wager as follows: “The symbol, used as a means of detecting and deciphering human
reality, will have been ver
end p.477
ified by its power to raise up, to illuminate, to give order to that region of human
experience [in this case, the confession of fault]beginning from this contingency and
restrictedness of a culture that has hit upon these symbols rather than others, philosophy
endeavors, through reflection and speculation, to disclose the rationality of its
foundation” (1967, 355, 357).
But we must ask: Power to illuminate whom, disclosure of rationality to whom? If it is to
the believing souls already within the contingent and restricted community that defines
itself in terms of the symbols in question, reflection would seem to be theology pure and
simple. If it is to believing souls from other religious communities as well, so that
Christians receive illumination from Muslim symbols and Jews perceive the rationality
embodied in Buddhist symbols, it would seem that reflection is still theological, though
of a more ecumenical sort. If what one writes is persuasive only to those within the circle
of certain presuppositions, it is not clear that reflection has transcended the hermeneutical