ABSTRACT
This chapter explores in more detail how Ricoeur reworked phenomenology in a new direction. It looks at his decisive departure from Husserl's original formulation of phenomenology. Ricoeur considers that the extension of phenomenology into hermeneutics requires a critique of Husserl's idealist model of consciousness. Ricoeur's critique of Husserlian idealism and his subsequent reformulation of phenomenology were influenced by a number of philosophical encounters. First, there was the lasting impact of his formative engagement with the 'concrete ontologies' of Gabriel Marcel and Karl Jaspers in the 1930s and 1940s. Ricoeur's mature exposition of the hermeneutic model of the text required not only a revision of the original project of phenomenology but of the hermeneutic tradition itself. The conflict of interpretations is for Ricoeur a logical consequence of the symbolic nature of language. Philosophy remains hermeneutics that is, a reading of the hidden meaning inside the text of the apparent meaning.
