ABSTRACT
Subsequent to writing The Symbolism of Evil Ricoeur came to see that interpreting symbols alone was not sufficient for hermeneutics. The Symbolism of Evil had separated out myths and their symbolic status from the language in which they were expressed, assuming the language itself to be perfectly transparent. But of course, the problem of double meaning can occur at the linguistic level as well. By the late 1960s, when Ricoeur has extended hermeneutics from being a theory of interpretation to a theory of interpretation through reading, the problem of meaning at the linguistic level becomes something he needs to address. This he does entirely within one substantial self-contained work, La métaphore vive (1975; The Rule of Metaphor, 1977).
