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Part 4
St Augustine’s reflections on Time are both interesting and problematic, from many different perspectives. He claims that we know what time is until we are asked the question “What is Time?”, whereupon we struggle to come up with an answer to this admittedly aporetic question. St Augustine claims that we have difficulty explaining what time is. It is not clear whether he intends to include the answer Aristotle gave to this question when he claims that our answers to this question are inadequate. Aristotle, as we know, provided us with the following definition of time: “The measurement of motion in terms of before and after”. St Augustine does not engage with this definition directly, so it is difficult to know what his position is. He did point out that Aristotle both thought that time is different from motion but related to it. The relation that Aristotle was thinking of was probably related to the category of “Quantity”. Apparently “The Categories” is the only work St Augustine mentions and this leaves us wondering about his view of the metaphysical aspects of Aristotle’s definition.
St Augustine argues that in order for us to measure or quantify change or motion, that change or motion must be something extended in space, and also in some sense present to us. He appears, however, not to adopt the implication of Aristotle’s definition that what is changing or moving must be something external to one. He appears to phenomenologically “bracket” this “externality, and instead describes this extension as an extension in the mind, implying that the presence is a presentness to the mind. St Augustine then argues that the past can only be made present to the mind via the power of memory whereas the future is made present to the mind via the power of expectation. One observation one can make about these reflections, is that there is no attempt at a definition of Time, but only an attempt to describe what is happening to the mind. Some commentators have taken St Augustine to be engaged in the phenomenological venture of describing the functions of Consciousness. It ought to be pointed out, however, that this idea of the present, is first and foremost a theological idea, that is related to the “eternal presence” of God for whom there can therefore be no past and future dimensions of time.Furthermore St Augustine does not aspire to producing an argument for the certainty of the existence of the human being, but rather characterises the consciousness of oneself in terms of doubt. We know it was doubt that set in motion the attempt to put the question, “What is time?” The Aristotelian response to this question, however, was not to describe what is happening in the mind but rather to say what time ontologically must be by referring to the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason in an argument. For Aristotle, furthermore, there must be something enduring and real in any change from something to its contrary. This something has two aspects, an external and an internal aspect. The internal aspect of this change is the subject that is of interest for the Delphic oracle and the prophecy “Know thyself!” , but the external aspect of this self is best given in Aristotle’s essence-specifying definition of the human self, namely, “rational animal capable of discourse”. Knowing what this self is, is of course, the most difficult of aporetic questions. “Enduring”, for Aristotle, does not mean eternally present but it does guarantee some form of finite existence which is related to the Greek notion of “psuche”. Human life in the Augustinian system differentiated itself from animal life in virtue of the fact that God breathed life into the human form. This divine breath sufficed to place us higher up on the chain of creation than animals, for St Augustine. Whereas for Aristotle, the fact that we were beings for whom our being was in question(cf Heidegger) sufficed for us to occupy one of the highest places on a chain of Being. Confronted by our own awe and wonder at the brute existence of the world, we sought not merely to describe and narrate but to explain, justify, and acquire knowledge as a result of our attempts to answer aporetic questions.
Having been created by the breath of God , for Augustine, sufficed for our doubt to be converted into hope for salvation in the conversion process that transformed us into citizens of the city of God rather than earthly citizens of de civitate terrana(Babylon).
Augustine, according to Wittgenstein, was mistaken in his characterisation of Language. Augustine resorts to description rather than explanation/justification and describes the way in which language learners learn to name objects, thereby suggesting that the naming function was the key element of language. Kant, on the other hand, puts the key moment of the learning of language, at that moment in time when the child ceases to refer to itself in the third person (e.g. Karl) and begins to use the word “I”. This moment for Kant is the dawn of thinking over a community of impulsive feelings. For Aristotle, perhaps the key moment is not just thinking but rather thinking something about something(what Heidegger called the veritative or truth-making synthesis). Naming carries no indication of time on the Aristotelian theory, and therefore must lack the complexity of a fully-fledged language. Augustine relates language to memory in his example of someone discoursing, and being aware of what has just been said, what is being said now, and what is shortly going to be said. This is, once again, a descriptive account of what the self is conscious of at any moment of any discourse, but what it fails to take account of, is the very important aspect of the reason why the speaker is saying what they are saying, e.g. perhaps because they believe in freedom of speech or justice on grounds they could defend if required to. It is clear on the Aristotelian and Kantian accounts of memory, that whilst there is a work of remembering operating here, there is also an implied work of reason preventing contradictions and preventing insufficient reasons from dominating the discourse. Obviously the tense-structure of language would also be a relevant aspect to describe if that was my purpose, and if I am in my discourse talking about the past, i.e. making historical judgments, then this would be an example of thinking about the past on Aristotles account. We can see in such complex circumstances how inadequate the Augustinian naming function of language is.
Aristotle, in his work “De Interpretatione”, maintained, as we have previously suggested that it is only with the verb that time is indicated in language–whether it be past, present, or future. The subject is that which is firstly indicated and this can be represented either by names or descriptions. Attaching a verb to the subject when we attempt to say something about this subject(in relation to this subject) is both indicative of time and truth on the condition we are dealing with a reporting use of language as is the case with historical statements. The Categories of Judgment(Quantity, Quality, Relation), Kant has argued, are even related to Aesthetic Judgments such as “This rose is beautiful”, even though these judgments are “subjective” and grounded upon the feelings of life and pleasure. It is this categorical structure that enables us to speak with a so-called “universal voice” in this matter, demanding a certain form of sensibility in relation to the rose. In these kinds of claim, the powers of understanding and the imagination are connected to the power of judgment. There is ,therefore, on both Aristotelian and Kantian accounts, no reason to believe that so-called “structures” have any priority over the categories involved in historical judgments, which are obviously objective statements about the past.
Aristotle focuses upon the past in his account of “recollection”. Augustine, on the other hand, focuses on the present in reflections upon time and its relation to memory. Aristotle shows no sigs of intellectual paralysis in the face of the question “What is time?”, because his reasoning is in accordance with the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. Furthermore, Aristotle embraces a metaphysical theory of change in which it is clear that the “past” in some sense “causes”(explains) the recollection, together with the intention or will to recall something. If this “something” is of importance to a community or a polis, it is extremely likely that the testimony of the relevant actors who witness events of great magnitude will be documented, and that this documentation will be preserved and stored in archives as part of the “work of remembering” or “recollection”-process. This archive would then, in the future, be placed at the disposal of historians. Fortunately for us these historians do not suffer from Augustinian doubts about Time. They not only know what time is, but they would explain it in much the same way in which Aristotle did.
Ricoeur raises the question of whether the writing of history is a remedy or poison. If like Theuth you do not equate recollection with “the work of remembering”, but rather with being “reminded” of something, then writing is clearly a poison rather than a remedy because this something that one is reminded of, may not be real. This may well have been a fair question to raise in relation to the writing down of myths, but when it came to the more disciplined work of remembering that occurs where reference is made to the testimony that is contained in archives, there surely cannot be any serious doubt about the fact that historians are writing about something real. Here we should also recall that we are not dealing here with a solipsistic historian sitting in his lonely study writing, with doubts about the truth of what he is communicating, but rather a community of historians, critically reviewing each other, writing knowingly about events that are real. In such a community the work of each is reviewed and criticised by all others(in terms of the truth-value of the judgments).
In a chapter entitled “The Documentary Phase” Ricoeur makes a very interesting claim that prior to the work that is archived lies another work , a work of testimony, done by living witnesses to the events of magnitude and significance so important to the existence and maintenance of the polis. Ricoeur’s reflections do not follow this particular path, but given the fact that historical events have both good and bad legal and political consequences, it is our assertion that the best “tribunal” for the evaluation of such consequences would be one in which practical reasoning is used. The kind of political reasoning we are referring to would be that of the “great-souled” statesman, the phronimos. The reasoning we would expect in legal tribunals, on the other hand, centres around a thesis about someones possible guilt, being confronted with an antithesis about possible innocence. In the course of such proceedings both physical evidence and testimony play a decisive role. The demand of the testimony is that it be true on pain of being subject to severe sanctions for contempt for the process. One can claim that the essence of such legal testimony is historical, in that it claims that an event or series of events significant for the outcome of the case , either did or did not occur. The transcendental presupposition behind the truth of this testimony is ” I was there!”(P.148).
Historians, engaging in discussing the truth content of a peers work, are interested in passing judgment upon that work in accordance with multiple criteria which include evaluating the truth-value of the judgments contained in a context of explanation/justification typical of all sciences concerned with the advancement of knowledge. Important in this process, of course, is the place or site of the action or event. In this context, Ricoeur points to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological reflection upon the lived body in order to make sense of “my-place” in relation to the action or event. “Places of habitation” in a city(P.150) are also important elements of historical accounts as is the “geography of the city”. Ricouer refers favourably to to a view expressed by Braudel in his work “The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world in the Age of Philip II” (trans. Reynolds, S., New York, Harper and Row(two vols)1972-3):
“Any civilisation is at bottom space worked by men and history.”
Ekonomos or Economics will be an important aspect in this civilisation-building work. Historical time will of course transcend lived-time in political contexts. Historical time will also refer to the time of the foundation of the civilisation being written about. Such dating, of course, presupposes a calendar-system that in its turn bears some relation to cosmic time( the movement or change of position of heavenly bodies(rotational or orbital)) This lived-time, historical-time and cosmic-time framework, helps to inscribe events in a continuum. The lived-time of witnesses is positioned in this framework and helps to create the content we find in our archives. The finitude of a human life stands out against this potentially infinite continuum as a “brief” instant of time, a brief candle that seemingly burns and extinguishes in an instant. The Being-toward-death so important in Heidegger’s “Being and Time” pales in comparison to temporal and spatial magnitude of historical events and action that affect the future and perhaps the fate of everyone, whether they have been born yet or not. Now whilst death finds a limited place in the historical archives as does love in the register of marriages, these finite aspects of lived-time are left to the poets and writers who hope to survive in our libraries after their death.
Ricoeur takes up the notions of cyclical time as represented in the days, weeks, months and years of the calendar, and the notion of linear time represented by the non-calendar time of centuries and millennia (P.156). Cosmic history of course transcends calendars and clocks, and even the presence of witnesses. In the light of such long time-periods which the Greeks felt might stretch back into infinity along an infinite continuum, we can understand that the longer the period of human history extends, the more it will tend to transcend even the fundamental element of event/action and become more concerned with longer speculative units, e.g. Hegelian chronosophies of progress versus philosophies of regression.
Ricoeur poses the fundamental question as to whether a history without direction, or continuity, is possible and he refers to Pomian’s suggestion that “structure” replace “periods” as an organising form(P.157). Such a suggestion would have the consequence of collecting periods into larger units such as “ages” which, Ricoeur argues, can cause problems if there are rival categorisations of these “ages”. What is clear is that “Structuralism”, as a linguistic theory, does not engage directly with either Aristotelian or Kantian categories, perhaps because these latter do not have a linguistic origin but rather are existential and logical/conceptual. The “naming” of “ages” or “periods”, is of course a complex matter, but a clue to an Aristotelian or Kantian view of a historical classificatory system that preserves intuitions of both direction and continuity is given in the naming of firstly, the era of Ancient Greece as a “Golden Age” and secondly the naming of that intense period that followed the “Dark ages” as “The Renaissance”(Rebirth of the Golden Age) These two “periods” are thus related to each other(continuity) and provide direction. Structuralism, as we know, in other contexts was a speculative theory that resulted in a reduction of historical phenomena to category-neutral events, which could then be inserted in an algebraic/logical combinatory matrix(P.160). Ricoeur, to his credit, raises some doubts about this methodological approach, and points to his own theory of action as an example of a critical response to structuralism.
Testimony is viewed by Ricoeur as an action/event. He raises doubt about this fundamental aspect of the historical process by referring to an experiment in which subjects were asked to reconstruct or reconstitute a film sequence they had witnessed. The results, it was concluded, raised serious questions about the trustworthiness of Testimony. Ricoeur raises the issue of whether these laboratory conditions were a fair reflection of the normal circumstances in which testimony is given, with some justification. If we take as our paradigm of testimony, what occurs in a legal tribunal, we can see that in such circumstances the focus is not solely on what happened, but also on its relation to the law: at the end of this process a judgment will be made as to whether a law had been broken or not. The focus of the experiment on “the what” without any involvement of “the why” may have been a confounding variable in the above experiment.
Historical writings, on the view of Kant, ought to concern themselves both with the truth and the direction and continuity of History. This involves concern with deeds of magnitude evaluated, firstly, by the practical idea of freedom, and secondly, the several formulations of the categorical imperative. Also important in this discussion is the way in which the historical plot “unfolds” in the historical narrative. Ricouer, however, leaves a question hanging in the air over the issue of the integrity of the “archives”: the question namely as to whether they are the remedy to a malady, or a poison. The myth of Phaedrus is invoked in relation to the claim that documents in an archive are “orphaned”, and need support from their authors who, as a matter of fact, may even be dead. In many cases, of course, the authors represented institutions of the polis and, in such circumstances, living confirmation of ones archived testimony is replaced by trust in these institutions, as judged of course by the historians working with the documents emanating from these institutions.
It is, theoretically possible that there occur an event/action of significant magnitude and all the witnesses may be killed, thus preventing the production of any documentation. Nevertheless the death of all the witnesses would raise questions by the communities they were part of, and probably launch investigations into the causes of these deaths.
Ricoeur takes up the issue of fraudulent documents placed in archives, but these documents, when compared with other documentation in the same archives as well as other archives, often violate the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason and stand out like flashing warning signs. Documents have been falsified in various places at various times in History, and have been discovered by either comparison with other documents or the testimony of living witnesses. For many, these unlikely possibilities suffice for them to classify History as a “Conjectural Science”(P.174). We have ourselves witnessed the testimony of living witnesses to the holocaust, and such testimony “tests” the veracity of the archived information all over the world. No one believes that a holocaust survivor with a number tatooed on their arm which is sequential to other numbers tatooed on other survivors arms, is un untrustworthy source of information. Questioning whether they have a photographic memory of the terrible events that occurred in the camps(as the above scientific experiment suggests) is not a rational response to their suffering. Were they to appear at a trial, as they did at the trial of Eichmann, their testimony would suffice to be archived as “truth”, given the judgment that was handed down against Eichmann. Paradoxically Eichmanns defence at this trial was covered by Arendt in her book on Eichmann in Jerusalem, and she noted after reading all the trial material that the defendant was not capable of “thinking”, as she put the matter. This angered many Jews and confused many academics who perhaps did not appreciate the subtlety of Arendt’s criticism. She pointed out that, when questioned, Eichmann often mechanically and robotically repeated clichés from a very limited verbal repertoire, giving the impression that he was delivering memorised phrases and responses. She also pointed to the judgment of many commentators, that Eichmann appeared ludicrously ridiculous” on the stand. We discussed the phenomenon of memorisation previously, and pointed out the fundamental difference between this phenomenon, and the “work of remembering” that is required by a process of questioning in a trial where ones life may be at stake. Memorisation, Ricoeur noted earlier, belongs in a matrix of authority relations, so it was not at all surprising to witness Eichmanns defence, which claimed that, in signing the orders for the transport of 1.5 million Jews, he was merely folllowing orders, which he found no reason to question.
In an interesting epistemological discussion of the relation of a fact to an event, Ricoeur claimed the following:
“A fact is not an event, itself given to the conscious life of a witness, but the contents of a statement meant to represent it.”(P.178-9)
So, what is true of a fact may not be true of an event. Wittgenstein’s attempted “final solution” to all the problems of Philosophy in his work “Tractatus” insisted that:
1.1 The World is the totality of facts. Not of things.
Wittgenstein then further insisted that so-called atomic facts are related to atomic states of affairs. This suggested that everyday facts were complexes and could be divided up in much the same way as objects could, e.g. a broom, composed of the “parts” of a brush and a handle. Events such as swimming are presumably, at least theoretically, divisible into an agent and an action, but facts are categorically different on Ricoeur’s account: being “contents” of representational statements, i.e. they have a propositional character. He continues outlining the distinction:
“..it is as the ultimate referent that the event figures in historical discourse. And it is to preserve this status of the reference of historical discourse that I distinguish the fact as “something said”, the “what” of historical discourse from the events as “what one talks about”, the “subject of…” that makes up historical discourse.”(P.179)
The above accords with the idea that the fact is predicated by “That….”, e.g. in a context of saying/believing/knowing, something about something. The ultimate meaning of a historical event may well be “something that happens”, but that in turn must also in some sense be related to actions in which actors/cities/nations/civilisations are attempting to “make something of themselves”, in accordance with arché, diké, epistemé, areté and phronesis. Ricoeur does not venture down this path of reflection, in spite of his earlier proclamation concerning the importance of action theory. An event is clearly, logically, not something that is “done” , but seemingly, rather, falls into the category of “what happens”, or “what takes place”, e.g. a pubic event. In Law, a fact is the truth about an event. This characterisation would conform to Aristotelian theory and the view that the role of the fact is to say something about something.
In Wittgenstein’s early work, the Tractatus, we are told that the world is all that is the case and one interpretation of this leaves us with the OED definition of a fact as “a thing that is the case”. Reports in archives mostly contain facts and not just information that has to be “interpreted”. This implies that much of the work of the historian involves explaining and justifying the facts in documents , rather than “Interpreting information”.
Ricoeur interestingly raises the possibility of a conflict of interpretations of events, especially if living witnesses who were “present” at an event, contradict accounts of the event given in the archives. Such an occurrence is certainly a possibility, but an unlikely possibility, when we are dealing with events of magnitude that have many consequences for many people over long periods of time, e.g. the holocaust. Ricoeur, curiously, refers to this as a crisis of testimony: a crisis of belief and trustworthiness. For Ricoeur, testimony may be flawed and he hopes that situating representation in a context of explanation will save its “reputation”. The fact of the matter, however, is that the so called “reputation” of testimony is constituted by its occurrence in a context of explanation/justification, and it is exactly this feature that guarantees its validity.