The aim of this article is to show that the “attestation of evil and testimony of hope” are characterized by the genitive that accompanies them. This places them both, each no less than the other, in two different horizons: while the horizon of attestation is Heideggerian, the horizon of testimony is a legacy of Jean Nabert. Both of these horizons are present in the thought of Ricoeur, and characterize the entire spectrum of his work. However, we are not dealing here with a syncretism resulting from the co-presence of a hermeneutic source and of the philosophy of reflection. On the contrary, I attempt to show that the copresence of attestation and testimony results from the fact that Ricoeur never stopped “walking on two legs,” given what he writes in a conversation published in the Critique and Conviction, and that this presence is rooted in Ricoeur’s formation, which is at the same time philosophical, literary and biblical, as he never renounced either the former one, or the latter ones.

This essay offers a personal account of the author’s friendship and collaboration with Paul Ricoeur in the last years of his life. Catherine Goldenstein, who, after Ricoeur’s death, took care of his manuscripts and organized the archives of the Fonds Ricoeur, reflects on her conversations with the philosopher. Their contents, recorded as she remembers them, illuminate Ricoeur’s philosophical endeavors and his work as an academic instructor. Ricoeur is also viewed through the testimony of letters addressed by him to the author, through his personal notes, and through the events of his academic career. These perspectives combine to offer a concise and challenging vision of a life devoted to reflection, whose ultimate boundary is a reality we do not know directly: that of eternity.

Every reader of Ricoeur knows that hermeneutics endeavors to answer the aporiae of historical phenomenology. Hence arises the need to return to those aporiae and those answers. On the one hand, phenomenology, born with the maxim of going “directly to things themselves,” is confronted with the incessant evasion of the thing itself and with its dreams of presence being thereby shattered. This reversal should not be blamed on the failings of this or that thinker, but attributed to the very destiny of phenomenology itself. On the other hand, Ricoeurian hermeneutics takes note of a gap (the very remoteness of the thing itself), and of a necessary return (to the thing of the text). Thus, there is nothing for thought itself to grieve over with respect to this enterprise. However, while the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, faced with the same difficulties, orients itself towards political philosophy, the hermeneutics of Ricoeur rather seeks to lead us to a philosophy of religion. This article hypothesizes that, in spite of the formula (inherited from Thévenaz) of a “philosophy without an absolute,” the thought of Ricoeur heads in fair measure towards the Absolute, and that ontology is not the only name of the Promised Land.