For Ricoeur, the “reflective philosophy” is part of the “re-bending” on itself, to establish the “I” of thought as the first truth: “I think, then I exist”. But Ricoeur thinks that “reflection is not intuition” of the self because the “I think” is only an abstract and empty truth. The self can only be found in your objectification. Therefore he will say that reflection can only be understood as “the effort to apprehend the Self of the Ego caught in the mirror of his objects, of his works and, finally, of his actions”. The Self lives perished and forgotten among his works, in which his desire and effort to exist is manifested. Reflection should therefore not be directed directly towards the Self, but towards its works and actions, which, given its ambiguous nature, must be interpreted. Thus, reflexive philosophy becomes “hermeneutic philosophy” or interpretative.
Ricoeur defines the symbol as a sign whose signifier (word, object, gesture, etc.) has a “double meaning” or meaning, in such a way that the first and manifest meaning refers to a second meaning that can only be reached through the first.
However, you will notice that there is no single way to interpret the symbols of language, so for Freud they are a disguise of repressed desires, or for the religious phenomenology of
Mircea Eliade, a revelation of the sacred. Thus, conflicts between interpretations between conflicting conceptions are observed. In this way, interpretation can be considered an “exercise of suspicion” in that interpretation is to unmask illusions (false values for Nietzche, ideologies for Marx or unconscious drives for Freud or, the interpretation is to “collect” the meaning, while there is a “truth” in the symbol.
Initially, Ricoeur leans towards the second of the interpretations, conceiving the sign as a restorative of meaning, although considering that hermeneutics must unite dialectics through suspicion and trust, demitologization and the restoration of meaning. And thus, he will conceive hermeneutics as an “archeology of the subject” (discovering the ancestral and primitive) but also a “theology of consciousness” looking for symbols or figures that give meaning to the progress of self-consciousness.
