Paul Ricoeur

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“Hermeneutics seems to me to be animated by this double motivation: willingness to suspect, willingness to listen; vow of rigor, vow of obedience. In our time we have not finished doing away with idols and we have barely begun to listen to symbols. It may be that this situation, in its apparent distress, is instructive: it may be that extreme iconoclasm belongs to the restoration of meaning.” (Freud and Philosophy, 27)

“We feel that interpretation has a history and that this history is a segment of tradition itself. Interpretation does not spring from nowhere; rather, one interprets in order to make explicit, to extend, and so to keep alive the tradition itself, inside which one always remains. It is in this sense that the time of interpretation belongs in some way to the time of tradition. But tradition in return, even understood as the transmission of a depositum, remains a dead tradition if it is not the continual interpretation of this deposit: our ‘heritage’ is not a sealed package we pass from hand to hand, without ever opening, but rather a treasure from which we draw by the handful and which by this very act is replenished. Every tradition lives by grace of interpretation, and it is at this price that it continues, that is, remains living.” (Structure and Hermeneutics, 27)

“All three [Marx, Nietzche, and Freud] clear the horizon for a more authentic word, for a new reign of Truth, not only by means of a ‘destructive’ critique, but by the invention of an art of interpreting.” (Freud and Philosophy, 33)

“Reading is the pharmakon, the remedy, by which the meaning of the text is rescued from the estrangement of distanciation and put in a new proximity which suppresses and preserves the cultural distance and includes the otherness within the ownness” (Interpretation Theory, 43).

“Tradition raises no philosophical problem as long as we live and dwell within it in the naivete of the first certainty. Tradition only becomes problematic when the first naivete is lost. Then we have to retrieve its meaning through and beyond estrangement. Endless struggle with distanciation.” (Interpretation Theory, 43-44)

"The right of the reader and the right of the text converge in an important struggle that generates the whole dynamic of interpretation. Hermeneutics begins where dialogue ends." (Interpretation Theory, 32)

“For Gadamer we must choose between truth or method. Ricoeur, on the other hand, suggests not an opposition, but a dialectical relationship. . . between explanations (method) and understanding (truth) which enable us more adequately to describe the tension between the self and the other, and to remain responsible to . . . explanatory methods.” (David Jaspers, “The Limites of Formalism and the Theology of Hope: Ricoeur, Moltmann and Dostoyevsky," In Literature and Theology, I, 1987, 4; cf. 1-10.)