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the most meaningful contemporary sweeps in addressing the sense of existence, evenwithin the context of the postmodern situation. Perhaps one must at this point admit that theopening of phenomenology to hermeneutics cannot constitute the entirety of philosophy, but,rather, it is merely a necessary stage through which any serious contemporary effort passesfor philosophical adequacy in any attempt to do justice to interpreting existence.Such a stage on the way toward a fuller philosophy, allows -- even forces -- any attemptat a more far-reaching reading and writing to avoid over-simplification and to do justiceto the richness of existence without reducing it to a false unity or univocal sense. I believethat it is obvious to any serious scholar in contemporary thinking that such a grafting ofhermeneutics onto phenomenology is not only viable but necessary. Yet there is more thanone way for this to be worked out, and I believe that somewhere within the contrastingapproaches of Martin Heidegger and Paul Ricoeur lies a very viable way of actualizingthis renewed method, and one which responds well to the challenge of deconstruction inits tendency to subvert sense or meaning and the living present. I consider the subversionof such deconstruction to lie in a simplistic dichotomy between the living present and itsconstitutive elements of retention and protention, and the closure entailed in any sense ormeaning at which one arrives. While it may be the case that I am over-interpreting thisdichotomy in deference to hermeneutic phenomenology’s reading of sense and the livingpresent, it is clear from his texts that Derrida tends toward the extremes, even though thesemay be only latent. I have explored the extremes 1 so that the gains of a middle way --that of hermeneutic phenomenology -- can be won, and the regressive move by deconstructioncan be redirected. 2In order to prevent these extremes, the enlightening ways of such a graft by MartinHeidegger and Paul Ricoeur can be invoked. The outcome of their expansion in relationto one another pushes to the fore a path for philosophy today that is open to the traditionboth of the past as well as of the future as one aspect of the ongoing and living traditionunfolds. The stark contrast between their appropriations of hermeneutics and phenomenologymust be clear in the effort to work out a unified and consistent method. The reciprocitythat Ricoeur admits between phenomenology and hermeneutics, in acknowledgingthe influence of Husserl and at once that of the tradition of Biblical hermeneutics, mustbe considered in contrast to Heidegger’s attempt to develop phenomenology in such a wayas to coordinate hermeneutics with the internal development of Dasein’s understanding,thus supposedly deepening the arc of hermeneutics to the point where the previously hiddenpre-comprehension of Being emerges as the guideline for focusing on human existencein ontical terms. In his pivotal essay “Existence and Hermeneutics,” Ricoeur contrastshis own “longer way” to ontology to Heidegger’s “shorter way,” contending that heremains on the level of epistemology of interpretation and its conflicts of hermeneuticmethods before moving too quickly to the ontology of understanding as Heidegger does.In doing so, he avoids a too quick move to interpreting a unity of human existence thatis, for him, more an aim than a given, as for Heidegger. In addition, he avoids the facileand prejudiced interpretation of human existence as essentially constituted by finitude atthe expense of the infinite. Thus, Ricoeur avoids the typically Heideggerian move tocollapse reason to sensibility.1Patrick L. Bourgeois, Philosophy at the Boundary of Reason: Ethics and Postmodernity, Vol. 1(New York: SUNY Press, 2001); idem, “Semiotics and the Deconstruction of Presence: A RicoeurianAlternative,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly (1993): 261-279; idem, “Trace, Semiotics, andthe Living Present: Derrida or Ricoeur,” Southwest Philosophy Review (1993): 43-63.2See Patrick L. Bourgeois, “Hermeneutics and Deconstruction: Paul Ricoeur in Postmodern Dialogue,”in Andrzej Wierciński, ed., Between Suspicion and Sympathy: Paul Ricoeur’s Unstable Equilibrium(Toronto: The Hermeneutic Press, 2003), 333-350.72