Daily Inspiration Quote by Paul Ricoeur

Ricoeur is staking out a third way between two intellectual temptations: the authoritarian itch to end debate by declaring one “correct” meaning, and the relativist shrug that treats every reading as equally untouchable. His sentence is built like a manifesto for democratic interpretation. “Always possible” is a deliberately defiant phrase; it refuses the mystique that sometimes surrounds texts (sacred, literary, ideological) as if their meanings were beyond contestation. Interpretation, for Ricoeur, is not a private vibe. It is a public act that can be challenged, compared, and judged.

The subtext is anti-cynical. He grants that agreement may be “beyond our reach,” but he won’t let that become an excuse for intellectual laziness or political quietism. The point is to keep the forum open: argue, confront, arbitrate. Those verbs matter. “Argue” presumes reasons; “confront” admits conflict; “arbitrate” concedes that standards exist even when they’re contested. It’s a vision of criticism as procedure rather than verdict.

Contextually, Ricoeur writes in the long aftermath of the “masters of suspicion” (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud) and the 20th century’s crises of meaning, when hermeneutics had to answer a brutal question: if interpretation is endless, how do we prevent it from becoming manipulation? His answer is a disciplined pluralism. We may never arrive at consensus, but we can still practice good-faith disagreement that aspires to it. That aspiration is the ethical core of the line.