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is not rationalist or idealist in that it is not simply a version of Leibniz’s “principle ofsufficient reason” (nihil est sine ratione). In human affairs there are many things whichare without reason or are resistant to reason, such that there is, and can be, no ultima ratioto which human beings could have access and which would bring their search for meaningto a happy conclusion. Apart from the absolute or “apodictic,” but empty, certainty of theEgo cogito type, the only kind of certainty available to humans is of a strictly relative andconditional sort, the kind of certainty Husserl called “empirical” or “presumptive.” 160Hermeneutics, as Ricoeur says, echoing Merleau-Ponty, is thus “a philosophy without anyabsolute.” (IA, 13) The highest knowledge we can attain to is the knowledge that thereare many things we do not know and likely cannot ever know, or even know that wedon’t know. As Pascal remarked, reason is nothing if it does not go as far as to recognizethat. 161 At some point or another, reason always runs up against the “opacity of the fact”which, as such, stares it in the face “with the inexorability of an enigma.” Hermeneuticenlightenment is not philosophical gnosis; it is, rather, as Gadamer said, “sophia, aconsciousness of not knowing…. [H]uman wisdom is…the awareness of not-knowing [dasWissen des Nichtwissens], docta ignorantia.” (RPJ, 31, 33) “There is,” as Gadamer alsostated, “no claim of definitive knowledge with the exception of one: the acknowledgmentof the finitude of human being in itself.” 162 To be reasonable is “to know the limits ofone’s own understanding.” 163To emphasize, as hermeneutic phenomenology does, the unsurpassable finitude ofhuman being is not, for all that, to issue a call for resignation in the face of the unknown;it is, rather, a recognition of the need for, as Merleau-Ponty would say, “unremitting virtù(la virtù sans aucune résignation).” (S, 35) The search for meaning can never be anythingother than a constant struggle for meaning, a struggle against our inveterate tendency tomisunderstand things -- as well as against what James called “a certain blindness” asregards the Other, and to which we are all prone -- by keeping ourselves open to new experiences,to further expansions in our horizons. When Gadamer said that “Being that canbe understood is language,” he was not making a metaphysical statement and was notclaiming that being could ever be made fully intelligible or that our life-experience couldever be fully explicated. He was, rather, pointing to what is morally incumbent on anyreflecting subject: “The principle of hermeneutics simply means that we should try tounderstand everything that can be understood.” (PH, 31) “A hermeneutically informednotion of truth,” as Calvin Schrag observes, is one “liberated from its traditionalepistemological paradigm,” 164 which is to say that, for hermeneutics, “truth” is not so mucha cognitivist-epistemological concept as it is an existential-moral concept and refers to away of living, a resolutely communicative mode of being-in-the-world. Truth, for hermeneutics,is always of a “processual” nature and is a matter of “openness.” “The truth,” asRicoeur says, “is…the lighted place in which it is possible to continue to live and tothink.” 165 Or, as Gadamer said, “The truth of experience always implies an orientationtoward new experience…. The dialectic of experience has its proper fulfillment not in160See Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment, trans. James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), sec. 77.161See Pascal, Pensées, no. 188: “Reason’s last step is the recognition that there are an infinitenumber of things which are beyond it. It is merely feeble if it does not go as far as to realize that.”162Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Science of the Life-World,” Analecta Husserliana 2 (1972): 184.163Gadamer, “The Power of Reason,” 14.164See Calvin O. Schrag, Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity (Bloomington, Ind.:Indiana University Press, 1986), 187.165Paul Ricoeur, “Reply to My Friends and Critics,” in Reagan, ed., Studies in the Philosophy of PaulRicoeur, no page no.48