 Contemporary hermeneutics receives further contour from Paul Ricoeur’s considerations of language, and especially of linguistic forms such as symbolism, metaphor, and narrative. Ricoeur takes orientation from the claim of the early Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology that self-understanding is, in the end, to be grasped in ontological terms: self-understanding is the self-interpretation of human existence, grasped as the enactment of the distinctive possibility of such existence. Ricoeur, however, proposes a hermeneutical phenomenology that, as he puts it in an important early essay, ‘grafts’ hermeneutics to phenomenology in a different manner than Heidegger proposes (Ricoeur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” 6). Heidegger believes that for the self-interpretation of human existence, the interpretations of the human condition found in the human sciences are derivative; what is called for is an analysis of the sense of being, or, the structures, of human existence as these are disclosed through our own individual being in the world. Ricoeur criticizes Heidegger’s proposal as a “short route,” or perhaps better, short cut, that bypasses the significance for our self-interpretation of the multiple and even conflicting interpretations of the human condition found in other disciplines and areas of philosophy (Ricoeur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” 6). He proposes, instead, a hermeneutical phenomenology that embraces a “long route” of self-interpretation, one that is mediated by passing through hermeneutical considerations of these multiple and conflicting interpretations (Ricoeur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” 6).