Human being, marked by the passion for the possible, constantly projects itself beyond the readily identifiable here and now. This capacity imaginatively to form future projects and orient oneself to them sets human existence apart from other types of life. No other beings “figure” the world as something it is not or is not yet. To be human is to create such figures. Ricoeur therefore proposes to begin his philosophical anthropology with a study of human creativity. Now the most striking evidence of human creativity for Ricoeur is our use of language. It is thanks to language that we can “figure” out what we will do “tomorrow.” And in poetry as nowhere else we see the myriad ways that a limited number of signs — the twenty-four letters of the Roman alphabet to be exact — have been arranged to speak to and about the depths of human being. Language as spoken and written is truly the infinite use of finite means. Ricoeur's fundamental philosophical “wager” is that he will have a better understanding of human being by attending to creative language. If to be human means to be constituted by a passion for the possible, then Ricoeur needs to examine the language of the possible.