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is emphatic that the problem extends well beyond any particular school of thought. It is the tendency, endemic to all of human thought, to avoid the risk of openness and otherness by seeking refuge "within the circle which I form with myself." 18 The image recalls the Lutheran definition of sin as the heart turning in upon itself, and the association is not inappropriate. For one cannot overstress the importance, for the development of Ricoeur's thought, of the struggle against philosophical solipsism in all its manifold forms. Indeed, just to touch upon three dimensions of this struggle is to give a virtual summary of Ricoeur's methodology. First, Husserlian phenomenology prevents existentialism, Marcellian or otherwise, from becoming self-enclosed; for it requires a careful description that proceeds by way of the object. As Ricoeur cautions in the opening pages of Fallible Man, "reflection is not introspection; for reflection takes the roundabout way via the object; it is reflection upon the object" ( 18 ). The circle is opened, a second center is posited, thought moves through a larger arcthis is the procedure which Ricoeur sometimes calls "distanciation." While the introduction of Husserl's rigorous method provides an instance, distanciation itself is less a strict method than a characteristic turn of thought that reappears in various forms throughout Ricoeur's career. The practice may explain why Ricoeur often expresses himself in essayistic fashion, and why his thought is always so exploratory, so distinctly ''on the way." An instance of the more general use of distanciation, and a second aspect of Ricoeur's early method, is the application of this procedure to phenomenology itself. For Husserl's phenomenology risks a solipsism of its own, that of the "transcendental ego." Accordingly, in Freedom and Nature Ricoeur juxtaposes the results of phenomenology with those of the empirical sciences. The result is an illustration of the conceptual "ellipse" sketched earlier: the testimony of the empirical sciences must be at least partially incorporated into phenomenologyonce again there is to be no facile eclecticismbut the result is a phenomenology that has been extended beyond its usual bounds. And here too one finds a larger lesson which proves applicable throughout Ricoeur's work; for the use of the empirical sciences in Freedom and Nature illustrates the fact that perspectives which, taken in isolation, might tend toward the reductionistic may actually become vehicles for greater openness when incorporated within a more encompassing movement or "detour" of thought. Striking illus-

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