Abstract

In later, retrospective texts where he explained his hermeneutical turn, Paul Ricoeur claimed that this turn was due to the impossibility of knowing oneself directly, through introspection, and the necessity to undertake the detour of interpretation with regard to knowledge of oneself. By going back to the first occurrences of this hermeneutical turn in his work of 1960, The Symbolism of Evil, this paper argues that other motives, which were later forgotten, were also at play and perhaps more instrumental, most notably the intention of salvaging modernity against itself and of curing it of its forgetfulness of the sacred.