We must let ourselves be drawn into the [hermeneutical] circle and then must try to make the circle a spiral. We cannot eliminate from a social ethics the element of risk. We wager a set of values and then try to be consistent with them; verification is therefore a question of our whole life. No one can escape this.”
Paul Ricoeur, “Lectures on Ideology and Utopia,” ed. George H. Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 184.
ht: Andy Stearns