Daily Inspiration Quote by Paul Ricoeur

Ricoeur is smuggling a big claim into a calm sentence: myth isn’t childish error awaiting correction by science; it’s one of the most serious tools a culture has for self-knowledge. The sly move is his insistence on “the world” doubled into “the other world” or “second world.” Myth doesn’t float above reality; it reroutes reality through a symbolic register where questions we can’t instrument-measure still get articulated. A “second world” is not escapism. It’s a staging area for meanings that ordinary description can’t hold without collapsing into platitude.

The intent here is to defend myth as interpretation rather than information. Myth “expresses” an “understanding” we already half-possess but can’t quite say straight: what it feels like to be a finite creature with origins you didn’t choose and an ending you can’t negotiate. “Foundation” suggests the terrifying opacity of where we come from (birth, ancestry, creation, the givenness of being). “Limit” names the hard edge of death, suffering, moral failure, time. Myth gives these boundaries a narrative and an image, making them shareable and thinkable, which is why it persists even in supposedly disenchanted modernity.

Context matters: Ricoeur writes after the 20th century’s crisis of meaning, in conversation with Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche (the “masters of suspicion”) and alongside structuralist readings of myth. He refuses both naive belief and cynical debunking. The subtext is a rebuke to modern arrogance: if you treat myth as mere superstition, you’re not getting smarter; you’re just becoming illiterate in the language humans use to face the abyss.