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trations in Ricoeur's later work are the incorporation of the Freudian "archaeology" within a larger teleology, and the appropriation of structuralism into a more comprehensive understanding of the literary text. It is through such detours of thought that "consciousness nourishes itself by recentering itself around its Other: cosmos, bios, or psyche. It finds itself by losing itself." 19 But finally, even when supplemented and offset in this fashion and indeed perhaps even because it has been so extended reflection will tend toward the pride of self-sufficiency. Thus a third dimension of Ricoeur's method: it proves necessary to confront reason with an object so dense and inexhaustible that we can never pretend to have fully appropriated it. This is the function performed variously in Ricoeur's philosophy by symbol, myth, metaphor, and narrative: because they speak in a voice other than that of conceptual reflection, such texts may serve as both source and limit.
"Symbol gives rise to thought." This maxim that I find so appealing says two things. The symbol gives: I do not posit the meaning, the symbol gives it; but what it gives is something for thought, something to think about. First the giving, then the positing; the phrase suggests, therefore, both that everything has already been said in enigma and yet that it is necessary ever to begin again and rebegin everything in the dimension of thought.20

Little imagination is required to link symbol, so understood, to the Marcellian concept of mystery. Of both it may be said that their opaqueness is their "very profundity, an inexhaustible depth." Each asks to be approached with a sort of respectful rigor by which the inexhaustibility will be, not reduced, but unfolded and affirmed. All of the Ricoeurian ventures in distanciation are occasioned by the self's tendency to close upon itself, which is simultaneously the tendency to reduce the other to an object that one can effectively grasp. But the whole that is testified in the various instances of symbol and mystery can never become object it is rather the "horizon" within which we live, move, and have our being. To honor this horizon, a second reflection strives constantly to break open premature, objectivized notions of the whole; and it is in this effort that one encounters, most fundamentally, the coalescence of the two aspects of Ricoeur's thought that are represented by Husserl and Marcel. Once again

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