“There is no self-understanding which is not mediated by signs, symbols and texts; in the last resort understanding coincides with the interpretation given to these mediating terms.”
What does it mean to understand oneself in a world saturated by symbols, stories, and signs? For Ricoeur, self-understanding is never a direct reflection of a pure inner core. It is always mediated and always interpreted. We don’t access meaning by staring inward but by taking a hermeneutical detour through world –culture, history, and language. Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology begins with a decisive break from the Cartesian cogito, as he replaces the transparent self with a subject whose identity unfolds through symbols, texts, and narratives. Meaning is never immediately given but, instead, always arrived at indirectly through interpretation.
Suspicion and Interpretation
Drawing on phenomenology and existentialism, Ricoeur develops a “hermeneutics of suspicion”, a term he uses to categorize thinkers such as Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche. Each, in their own way, shows how surface meanings hide deeper structures: desire, ideology, and repression. Ricoeur agrees that interpretation must sometimes be critical and dig beneath dominant narratives to expose distortion. But unlike reductionist critiques, he underlines his belief that interpretation can also be reconstructive. “There is no master discourse that settles our quest for univocal meaning once and for all,” he writes. This dialectic between suspicion and retrieval runs throughout Ricoeur’s work. It allows him to address not just what meaning hides but also how meaning is created, told, and lived.
Narrative, Time, and the Self
In his later works, such as Time and Narrative and The Rule of Metaphor, Ricoeur turns to language, not as a static system of signs but as a dynamic, creative process. The concept of the narrative function is central to this, which he describes as the capacity of storytelling to structure and clarify human experience in time.
All narratives, historical, fictional, poetic, share a temporal structure. What unfolds in time can be told in time. This reciprocity between temporality and narrativity enables us to make sense of our lives and actions.
At the heart of storytelling is the plot, a term Ricoeur borrows and expands from Aristotle. Plot, or muthos, is not just a sequence of events, it is the act of emplotment, the structuring process that organizes disparate happenings into a meaningful whole. A plot doesn’t just recount events; it makes them intelligible by weaving together actions, goals, consequences, and circumstances. “Nothing is an event unless it contributes to the progress of a story,” he claims.
This is the reason why history cannot sever itself from narrative. While historians refer to actual events and novelists invent them, both are narrating from the distance of retrospection. Both face the problem of time, and both rely on plot to create intelligibility. The difference lies in reference, not structure.
The Work of Interpretation
Ricoeur’s hermeneutics seeks to reconcile two often opposing tendencies: the romantic notion of empathy (understanding the author’s intention) and the structuralist concept of the autonomous text (analyzing signs and codes). He argues instead for a dialectic of understanding and explanation. To interpret a text is first to understand –to make sense of its internal logic, and its structuring principles. Then comes explanation, a second-order operation that uncovers the semantic, cultural, and historical codes that shape the text’s meaning. This movement ends with a return to understanding in an enriched way. For Ricoeur, the movement between understanding and explanation is necessary. Interpretation is never just feeling nor formula. It is a dynamic interaction between the reader, text, and world.
Metaphor and Narrative as Semantic Innovation
Ricoeur’s work on metaphor reveals another layer of his hermeneutics. Metaphor, like narrative, is a mode of semantic innovation—it creates new meaning by disrupting literal language and forcing us to reimagine what is being said. A metaphor is not just decorative; it is a way of seeing-as. It opens a new dimension of reference, one that challenges and transforms our conceptual frameworks.
This creative dimension is shared with narrative. Just as metaphor redescribes the world by bringing remote terms into contact, narrative fiction reshapes the structures of action and time, offering not just a mirror to life but a refiguration of it. Ricoeur calls this the transfiguration of reality—where fiction discloses new ways of inhabiting the world.
Mediations: From Symbols to Texts
Understanding, for Ricoeur, is always mediated—by signs, by symbols, and most of all by texts. He distinguishes three key stages:
- Signs: All experience is articulated in language.
- Symbols: Culturally embedded meanings, often with double or multiple interpretations.
- Texts: Discourse that detaches from its origin and becomes an autonomous world.
Texts, especially written ones, are where hermeneutics reaches its most intense form. Unlike face-to-face speech, texts are distanced from their original contexts. Yet this distance is productive. It opens up the possibility of self-transformation through reading. We come to understand ourselves not through introspection but through engagement with texts that project worlds we might inhabit.
The Narrative Self
Ricoeur’s lifelong philosophical project culminates in his concept of narrative identity. The self is not a fixed essence but a story constantly being told, revised, and retold. We are what we make of our pasts, our choices, our futures—through the act of narrative. This identity is fragile, always mediated, and always open to reinterpretation.
Philosophy, for Ricoeur, is a long detour. It doesn’t promise clarity through direct access but instead offers a mediated path—through culture, symbol, and text—toward a deeper understanding of who we are. It is in this detour, and not despite it, that philosophy becomes most meaningful.
liquid ground 