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Although there seems to be a wide gulf between the hermeneutics of Ricoeur andHeidegger, their views are close enough so that an encounter between them proves to bequite profitable for hermeneutics today in the postmodern situation. What will becomeclear is that each can learn a lesson from the other: the Heideggerian short way learns thatthere is an advantage to dwelling on the ontic level in order to resolve conflicts and tosolve problems often overlooked in attempting to trace the most direct route to thequestion of Being; and the Ricoeurian long way learns that the short way must be questionedin terms of a vision of a certain existential neutrality. The ensuing discussion willfirst turn to Ricoeur’s critique of Heidegger’s short way in favor of his long way beforeentertaining the possibility of inverting a basic dimension of that criticism from Heidegger’sdirection and before somewhat dissolving the radical antithesis between these two ways,thus providing a mutual enhancement of and a reciprocal gain for each way.One of Ricoeur’s basic objections to Heidegger’s short way is that it too quicklyreaches a unity of Dasein, which Ricoeur considers not to be forthcoming, and whichremains for him problematical in the sense that the unity of man can be considered onlyas a regulative idea rather than one which an ontology of Dasein should reveal. Heidegger,however, shows the advantage of a prior guidance from an originary level. For Heidegger,this is an ontology that provides a comprehensive and foundational unity below the tornexistence which supports the conflict of the hermeneutics of existence that have preoccupiedRicoeur for so long. The question for us now is whether the Heideggerian shortway provides a guidance to Ricoeur’s long way, or, rather, whether it subverts Ricoeur’sefforts to read various and conflicting aspects of existence. Thus the question must be confrontedas to whether it is necessary to take Ricoeur’s long way without the Heideggerianpre-comprehension as guide. Which is more fundamental? This inevitably leads us to thequestion of the priority of the epistemic or ontological in this context. This will be seento be a false question in that the epistemological and ontological are equi-foundational andare merely two possible methodological focuses on the same phenomenon. This point willnot be easy to establish in any Heideggerian context, but Ricoeur’s emphasis is instructivein helping us expand on both his and Heidegger’s limited view of the problem.Ricoeur emphasizes the conflict of interpretations as revealing differing aspects ofexistence that ontically found various hermeneutic methods. 3 Further, on this ontic leveland in an extended ethics, he has focused pointedly upon the problem of the place of evilin freedom within human existence and upon the ontic relation of human existence to theSacred, which is central to his whole philosophy. Thus, for Ricoeur, pausing to dwell on theontic has fostered an integration or a dialectizing of the symbols which support a phenomenologyof spirit and a psychoanalysis of desire, with their respective orientations toteleology and to archeology, both of which prepare for the relation to the Sacred withina phenomenology of religion and its eschatology. These advantages of the long way, forRicoeur, militate against Heidegger’s short way. Although his myriad writings on the hermeneuticsof existence and its conflict of interpretations in a philosophy of limits withinthe boundary of reason seem to entail a lengthy detour in dwelling on this ontic level beforereaching the promised land of ontology, their resolution still indicates the advantageof dwelling on the ontic level further than Heidegger does.The fundamental justification of the long way over the short way to ontology is theunderlying difference in the fore-comprehension of human existence. For Ricoeur the unityof man can only be a regulative idea, not achieved in existence and not easily accessibleto an ontology worked out too quickly. He says: “Moreover, it is only in a conflict of3Paul Ricoeur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” in idem, The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays inHermeneutics, ed. Don Ihde, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 19.73