Visits: 1254
Orienting oneself toward the future and in relation to the authentic resoluteness in the face of Death in Heideggerian manner, has another aspect, namely, that of the spirit of the progress of civilisation over time. This aspect is, in turn, intimately related to the Kantian question, “What can we hope for?” which is also logically connected to two other questions: “What can we know?” and “What ought we to do?”. All three questions are also oriented toward the future potentialities or possibilities of Dasein or Man in relation to his Being-in-the-world.
We have argued in previous essays that Historical writings, in spite of their primary orientation toward the past, are also oriented toward the future and concerned with answering the question “What ought we to do?”(on the basis of the historical knowledge we have). There is, in other words, no easy way in which to separate the epistemological purpose of historical knowledge from its moral or ethical purpose. Both of these purposes are also tied to answering the question “What can we hope for?” History, that is, also whilst being an activity that aims at the good in accordance with Aristotelian criteria, aims at providing us with objects of hope.
We have also argued in previous essays, that fictional narratives and historical narratives contain features in common, and although the knowledge that is used in fictional narratives is not tied to any particular methodology, as is the case with historical narratives, the knowledge used in the construction and appreciation of these narratives, nevertheless meets the criteria of justified true belief in contexts of explanation/justification.Time, for Kant, was an apriori notion structuring our sensory relation to the world: a relation that begins with the actualisation of sensations in relation to the external world, and thoughts in relation to our inner powers. This temporal ordering of our sensations and thoughts is, of course, an important stage in the actualisation of knowledge, but it is not the work of either the understanding or reason. The understanding’s task is to submit sensory work to the work of categorisation and the categories. Reason will regulate the sensory work and the work of understanding, via the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason, and thereby organise series of judgements into arguments which perform both explanatory functions in epistemic contexts and justificatory functions in action-related contexts. The measurement of time, might seem a highly theoretical aspect of something which we naturally experience every day, but the fact of the matter is, that the activity of measuring units and intervals is pragmatic in its intent. We organise our lives, partly by measuring the time of our lives and the time in our lives. Fixating upon the motion of events as per Aristotle’s definition of time is, then, not merely a theoretical exercise: its telos is to set an institutional standard which regulates activity. The motion of the sun obviously plays a large role in the creation of this life-organising standard system of measurement.
Ricoeur argues that all the above somehow is not presupposed in fictional narratives, on the grounds that, firstly, different fictional characters experience time differently and secondly, that sometimes it is the authors intention to call into question the everyday “normal” experience of time. It is, however, difficult to imagine, even in the latter case, that the Aristotelian elements of “before and after” can be discarded without compromising our understanding of what is happening in the narrative. Phenomenological “imaginative variations”, require also their conditions of possibility and whilst we can, of course, imagine a reversal of the before-after structure of time, e.g. imagine that the warmth of the room caused the warmth of the radiator instead of vive versa, this does not call into question merely our everyday experience of time, but also our experience of causality as well as the material and efficient cause of the warmth of the room. In such a possible imaginary variation, turning off the radiator would, of course, have no effect on the temperature of the room, and the question then becomes “What exactly is the point of the imaginary variation?” This reflection is not, of course, aimed at the level of the cosmological motion of the sun, but nevertheless presupposes the same causal commitments—i.e. the sun is not warm because it basks in a background warmth of the universe. The lived experience of the warm radiator and the cosmological phenomenon of the role of the sun in our lives, requires, not just the same form of commitment to causality but also a commitment to the before and after temporal aspect of experience. These commitments are not different commitments but fundamentally the same. If a fictional narrative, for some reason, decided to portray the state of affairs of our sun exploding, without any significant effect on our life on earth, it would indeed be difficult to situate such a narrative in relation to our knowledge and what we can hope for.
Of course fictional narratives can violate the conditions of possibility of our objects of experience, but if this occurs then there must be some literary purpose behind such a phenomenon. The mere “possibility” of a science fiction account of an exploding sun, and forms of life continuing on our earth much as they had done prior to such an event, is not a sufficient reason for believing that such an account is in accordance with our cosmological knowledge of suns and planets. Categories of substance, causality, relation, the hypothetical case of judgement, the categorical case of judgement, agency, community etc are all interwoven in various complex ways, and relate not just to the power of understanding, but also to the power of reason and its principles and laws. The power of the imagination, on the other hand, is a power of the sensible faculty of our minds which, of course, also has some role in the formation of our judgements. Science fiction falls into the “category” of the hypothetical case, and whilst myth also appears to fall into this category, the latter it seems has as an aim, the disclosure of the conditions of possibility of existence, whilst the latter appears to have the aim of disguising these conditions in favour of more fantastic hypotheticals.
Fictional narratives differ from historical narratives in that they are essentially intended as imitations of reality and its conditions, rather than designations that directly conceptualise past reality in a framework that is designed to aim at the Truth and the Good. Historical narratives, that is, must possess traceable ties via actual witness testimony and documentation.
Ricoeur claimed in a previous chapter that the Calendar is a third form of time, complementing what he referred to as psychic time and cosmological time. The cyclical motion of the sun, which is the standard which we use to meet each other at the same time every day, is, of course, a very different standard to that manifested by the chronicled time of the calendar that builds upon a continuum of different days, but these two systems of the clock and the calendar are both required for organising the continuous time of millennia. Both systems are necessary to situate events in time and both rely on the Aristotelian “before-after” principle of measurement. Calendar time, it is true, appears to require a beginning or zero-point. A beginning point(the birth of Christ) may at first sight appear to devalue the time that occurs before the beginning, but if, as has occurred ,the beginning point is conceived to be more like a zero-point this permits the neutral conceptualisation of time before the beginning point.
Ricouer introduces very technical phenomenological terms in his reflections upon time, and these tend to obscure many of the points he is attempting to establish. He follows Husserl, for example, in wishing to prioritise the notion of a present, which is under and over-laid by the retentions of the past, and the protentions of the future. Ricoeur uses this to cast doubt upon the similarities of everyday calendar time and fictional calendar time. The only substantial difference between these two forms of time is that, in fiction, the author is imitating real time without, however jeopardising the before-after principle.
The problem, as Ricoeur puts the matter, of unifying the temporal flow of phenomenological time, requires a “bracketing” of above forms of lived and cosmological time. In the context of this discussion,the Heideggerian notion of repetition links authentic forms of temporality with what he calls the “world-time” of Dasein, but this is done without linkage to the Husserlian retentions and protentions of inner-time consciousness.
The “imitations” of time that we encounter in fictional narratives require acknowledgement of the before-after principle that is used in everyday life, and in other forms of time and narrative. In cases where the intention of the author concerns imitating an authentic resoluteness in the face of death, the purpose of the imitation is partly to answer the questions “What ought we to do?”(in the face of our mortality) and “What can we hope for?”. The hypothetical possibility of “imaginary variation” is, in fictional narratives, more often related to inauthentic forms of the relation to death. Ricoeur brings this aspect forward in several of his narratives “about time”, in which a major character takes their own life in an act of suicide. This, from a Kantian perspective, could never be a standard by which to organise our life, simply because it violates the Kantian principle of practical noncontradiction( i.e. it does not on this account make sense to use ones life to take ones life). Whatever the intention of the author is, in depicting such events, it must always be understood in the light of this principle of noncontraditcion. This does not mean that it is impossible to conceive of someone actually, in fact, taking their life, but rather that taking ones life is not what one ought to do as a response to suffering of various forms. This Kantian reflection is compatible with the Heideggerian authentic form of resoluteness in Daseins being-toward-death. The Heideggerian notion of Care is also compatible with Kantian critical Philosophy, which instead of talking in terms of being-a whole, as Heidegger does, refers to a totality of conditions which it is reasons task to explore.
Ricoeur also reflects upon the Weberian idea of ideal types in relation to fictional narrative, but it is unclear exactly what role this idea has, especially in relation to phenomenological “imaginary variations”. Ricoeur ends his discussion of this matter in the following way:
“It is precisely the work of the imaginative variations deployed by tales about time to open up the field of existentiell modalities capable of authenticating “being-towards-death”(P.141)
Of course, it is in some sense “possible” to violate the principle of practical contradiction, and use ones life to take ones life, if by that one means that one can actually commit suicide, but just because such a phenomenon is possible, this does not entail that it ought to lay claim to being an authentic form of being-towards-death. That we have actual historical examples of such authentic resoluteness in the face of death(e.g. the death of Socrates), and that this was communicated to us via the writings of Plato, serves to highlight the essential similarity between historical and fictional narratives(some of Plato’s Socratic dialogue used Socrates as a mouthpiece for the theory of forms which it is not clear Socrates would have endorsed).