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I We find an instance of Ricoeur's orientation toward primary affirmation in an early essay in which he calls for a philosophical "humanism" which can provide a response to "the peril of the 'objectification' "of the human being. Humanism, understood as the struggle of thought against such objectification, extends beyond the common notion of the humanities: it becomes the effort to reclaim and reaffirm "the lan of humanity." 2 In this light one may readily say that Ricoeur's own work is profoundly humanistic; in and through the interpretation of human experience, he has sought to fashion "a notion of being which is act rather than form, living affirmation, the power of existing and making exist."3 But as Ricoeur's reference to struggle indicates, philosophical affirmation cannot remain simple and indiscriminate. Saying "yes" to the fullness of the human means pronouncing a resolute "no" to each of the various forms of reductionism, which would constrict or deny the reality of human freedom. The most obvious instance of such reductionism is the scientific positivist, the advocate of a narrow empiricism; but the reductionist label applies to any method which seeks to explain away the fullness of our experience by dismissing that experience as ''nothing but" the effect of this or that underlying cause. Ricoeur's teacher, Gabriel Marcel, has posed the issue forcefully:
We should have at this point to make a direct attack on general formulations of the type, "This is only that... This is nothing other than that...", and so on: every deprecatory reduction of this sort has its basis in resentment, that is to say, in passion, and at bottom it corresponds to a violent attack directed against a sort of integrity of the real .... 4

The deprecatory spirit assumes many guises; there may be a behaviorist reductionism, a Freudian reductionism, a Marxist reductionism, a structuralist reductionismand it is testimony to the robust character of Ricoeur's peculiar humanism that, at one point or another in his career, he has engaged each of these challenges in vigorous debate.5 But Ricoeur's way of approaching such debate tends to be more

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