This article examines Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics of suspicion as one of the major turns in contemporary hermeneutic philosophy. It analyzes its philosophical foundations, its intellectual context, and its role in reconstructing the relationship between explanation and understanding. The study asks how Ricoeur reworked the critical legacy of Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche to construct a hermeneutic project that moves beyond traditional philosophies of consciousness. It also asks how this project moves from the critique of consciousness toward the recovery of meaning and selfhood. The article adopts an analytical-hermeneutic method and offers a critical reading of the main Ricoeurian texts relevant to this question. The analysis shows that Ricoeur did not adopt the hermeneutics of suspicion as a destructive project. He treated it as a necessary methodological stage for freeing meaning from the illusions of false consciousness. He also integrated psychoanalysis, the critique of ideology, and genealogical critique into a broader hermeneutic project based on the complementarity of explanation and understanding. The study further shows that human behavior, like a text, remains open to interpretation. Self-understanding is not achieved directly. It is mediated by language, symbols, texts, and history. The article concludes that the philosophical value of the hermeneutics of suspicion lies in its ability to move beyond traditional oppositions between suspicion and trust, and between explanation and understanding. Interpretation thus becomes a horizon for reconstructing the self and recovering meaning in contemporary thought.