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Ricoeur’s overall work follows a rather complicated trajectory and undergoes numerousshifts in direction, all nevertheless “nesting one within the other.” (IA, 38) Subsequent tohis early writings on the will, there is a gradual progression in his work from ahermeneutics of the symbol through a confrontation with Freudian psychoanalysis andstructural linguistics to a hermeneutics of the text, and from there to a hermeneutics ofaction and intersubjectivity (passing by way of an analysis of metaphor, time, and narrativity)and culminating (at the time of this writing) in a renewed concern with ethics andpolitics (with issues such as justice, responsibility, remembrance, and phronesis orpractical wisdom) -- Ricoeur’s overriding concern throughout all of this having been theacting person (l’homme agissant), a concern which reflects his indebtedness to the personalistphilosophy of Emmanuel Mounier, a philosophy, in Ricoeur’s words, “of man’srecurrent protest against being reduced to the level of ideas and things.” 111 (MTP, 356)Although Ricoeur, like his phenomenological predecessors, was always highly critical ofHusserl’s philosophy of consciousness or what he generally refers to as Husserl’s“idealism” (“transcendental subjectivism” might be a more appropriate term), he neverthelessalways considered the heritage of Husserlian phenomenology to be “the unsurpassablepresupposition of hermeneutics.” (IA, 36; it was, indeed, Ricoeur’s early work asa translator and interpreter of Husserl that firmly established his academic credentials.112 )Because the particular shape Ricoeur’s work has taken is the result of the debates hehas engaged in on numerous different occasions with proponents of other views withwhich he felt he had to come to terms, his philosophical development is extremelycomplex with many twists and turns along the way (one might say that Ricoeur’s“method” [methodos, the way he followed in his thinking] is essentially one that proceedscontinually by way of detours). 113 There is nonetheless a kind of Ariadne’s threadrunning through it all, an underlying continuity in terms of both method and motivation.Methodologically speaking, Ricoeur’s basic concern, like that of other phenomenologists,has always been the reflexive-transcendental one of bringing our lived experience to theproper expression of its own meaning. As he stated in an early work, the vocation ofphilosophy, as he sees it, is “to clarify existence itself by use of concepts.” 114 Ricoeur’sphilosophical motivation in this regard is his fundamental belief that our existence isindeed meaningful, and thus expressible (dicible) -- this belief in the expressibility or“sayability” (dicibilité) of experience corresponding to Gadamer’s thesis as to thelinguality or “speakability” of the world (die Sprachlichkeit der Welt). “There is no humanexperience that is not structured by language” (BSS, 680), Ricoeur maintains, echoing asit were Merleau-Ponty.Ricoeur’s philosophizing has in this way always been a search for meaning and hasthroughout been guided by a “central intuition,” or basic conviction, viz., that, notwithstandingthe very real existence of unmeaning, necessity (unfreedom), and evil, there is111For an excellent survey of Ricoeur’s philosophical writings, see Mark Muldoon, On Ricoeur(Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 2002).112See Ricoeur’s translation of, and commentary on, Husserl’s Ideen I: Ideés directrices pour unephénoménologie (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), a work that Merleau-Ponty used and cited in his lectures at theSorbonne in the early 1950s.113For an account by Ricoeur of the piecemeal way in which he has handled philosophical problems,see Paul Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction: Conversations with François Azouvi and Marc de Launay,trans. Kathleen Blamey (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 81-82, hereafter CC; for a thematicoverview of Ricoeur’s work, see Domenico Jervolino, “The Unity of Paul Ricoeur’s Work,” in Wierciński,ed., Between Suspicion and Sympathy.114Paul Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary, trans. Erazim V. Kohak(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1966), 17.33