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Calendar Time, for Ricoeur, is a bridge between lived time, and and what he refers to as “universal time”, and this distinction provides him with a framework for a hermeneutics of historical consciousness which, in turn, enables an inquiry that he claims does not originate in the assumptions tied to “the epistemology of historical knowledge”. This form of historical consciousness, Ricoeur claims, is to be distinguished from the mythical form of consciousness which belongs to mythical times, and which embraces the idea of ” a great time”(P.105). Aristotle refers to a concept of ” a great time” in his work entitled “Physics”. All forms of time are represented in this Aristotelian idea, the great cosmic cycles, the cycle of psuche(life) and the temporal linear progression of social activity within the confines of a polis or nation.
Myth and ritual work together to situate human life in relation to the great cosmological changes, and the lesser forms of change, connected to the rhythms of life and community. The clock and the calendar, for example, time the occurrence of recurring festivals that shape the form of life we define in terms of “rational animal capable of discourse”. We observe the clock hands move constantly to designate the same times every day, which, in turn, enables the organisation of life beyond the dawning of the day and the falling of night. On the other hand, the dating of events is a linear progression which relates back to a founding event and a beginning(the birth of Christ) and this is a non cyclical form of time, which forms a dating system that provides man with :
“a uniform infinite continuum, segmentable at will.”(Beneveniste)(P.107 in Ricoeur)
This continuum, then, requires a connection of a present to a past and future, which requires the understanding of the different kinds of Aristotelian “causal” explanations in any attempt to fully understand events leading from and to other events of significance in our life. Every instant is an open- ended possibility that might be filled by an event of transformative significance for my life and/or community. We might find such an event in a speech, given by a man condemned to death in his prison cell, or, in the discourse of other significant figures whose task it is to generate good for their communities. These figures both rely on ,and themselves form part of, narratives with necessary and universal components: narratives that both seek to embody knowledge and aim at the good.
The succession of these important figures over generations, themselves, become part of a grand narrative that we can find embodied in our historical writings. It is the universality of ideas that allows the synthesis of, otherwise seemingly unconnected, events. The mortality of individuals obviously also plays an important role in the process of narratising the important events of an era, whether it be an all-embracing era such as the “Golden Age of Greece” or the “Age of enlightenment” that swept through much of the world two millennia later. The concept of a “generation”, also serves as an integrating idea, because it is greater than the life of an individual, but smaller than that of an “Age”. Such a concept also appears to allow a phenomenological investigation into the experiences of generations and the experience of the “we” which is both directly and anonymously experienced.
Ricoeur invokes Max Weber’s concept of “ideal types”, to characterise the sociological roles of actors occupying various positions in society. This concept, perhaps, makes use of a problematic view of the ideal, which disconnects the ideal from the real, and thus from its epistemological and metaphysical implications. The ideal of “generation”, on the other hand, means to refer to ancestral testimonies about events that have not been witnessed by later generations, concerning people they never knew. This enables a generation to retain a sense of the past in a present, looking out onto a different future. Individually however, all individuals of a generation are destined to die, but they can transcend this death, in the idea of the next generation, bearing this sense of the past into their futures. The idea of a species which, perhaps Aristotle was attempting to define in his definition “rational animal capable of discourse”, is an idea of the human form of psuche(life) This idea spans all generations.
Traces of the past are lodged in historical archives, and are created and sustained by institutions, whose aims and goals are connected jointly to the Truth and the Good. In both of these contexts, the facts are of central importance, but it must be pointed out that these are not the atomic “facts” of the scientists or scientifically inclined philosophers, e.g. logical atomists, logical positivists, but neither are they the correlates of the “essences” the phenomenologist is in search of. Such essences are not products of the understanding and reason, as conceived by Aristotle and Kant, but rather related to experience, and organised by perception and imagination. The faculties of understanding and reason are related to the telos or purpose of conceptualising intuitions and experience. This conceptualisation process is regulated heavily by the questions of “What happened?”, and “Why did what happened happen?” The “Why” in this latter question, proceeds on the assumption that the process of conceptualisation is firmly embedded in the context of explanation and justification. In such contexts the beginning of the process of reflection is a principle or law, whose intention is to organise experience. Classical Science, of a certain kind, also uses this context, but modern science is more inclined towards contexts of exploration/discovery in which perception and imagination obviously play important roles. Whilst experience is in focus, these two faculties become importantly relevant powers of cognition. Focussing on the potentiality of rationality of man, on the other hand, demands a type of reflection that takes a metaphysical transcendental view of experience, of the kind we find in Kantian Critical Philosophy, and Aristotelian Hylomorphic Philosophy. These kinds of reflections, are perhaps essential if one is to respect the logic of the difference between the contexts of explanation/justification and the contexts of exploration/discovery.
Historical attachment to the verifying power of official documentation, is an important conceptual, rather than experiential element of the historical process ,and it is part of the kind of reasoning we find in Critical and Hylomorphic Philosophy. The document, on this non-phenomenological view, is not a “trace” of an experience, but rather a conceptual transfiguration, which is partly regulated by the principles and laws of History. The experience of the “passage of time”, highlighted by Augustine, and the idea of a past, as something that has passed away, forces upon us a notion of a “trace of the past”(P.119). The trace, on such an account, is viewed as a kind of monument rather than a conceptual entity that has selectively transfigured experience for the purposes connected to the ideas of The Truth and The Good.
Heideggerian existentialist/phenomenological concern with Care does not directly encourage a focus upon the knowledge and Truth aspect of the Historical process. The Heideggerian emphasis on the temporal dimension of the future, on the other hand, is an important aspect of that focus upon the idea of the Good, so important to Aristotle in the arena of human activity. This temporal dimension, is prioritised in Heidegger, and becomes the essential temporal dimension. This, together with the holistic idea of Care, becomes important in the human sciences in general, especially if the concept of forms of life can avoid all attempts at materialistic or dualistic characterisations.
Heideggerian references to what is termed “world historical”, relies on the idea that the “equipmental ready-to-hand context”,of the historical, has disappeared. Ricoeur brings to this debate, notions of the surplus and decrease of meaning. This enables him to view the above mentioned concrete “remains”, as part of the possibility of disclosing the character of Dasein’s “having been there”(P.122). The remaining trace can obviously be dated, and find a place in the framework of the continuum provided by calendar-time: moreover the concrete physical remains of monuments can be carbon-dated by the extremely exact procedures of Science. In this kind of investigation, the beginnings and ends of physical processes, in the context of the time of cosmic processes are very significant. On a daily basis, however, in our everyday Being-in-the-world, it is the clock as well as the calendar that decides, for example, when we shall meet a friend in the agora, and indeed decides all meetings, formal and informal in the polis. The day, otherwise , does not play a significant role in scientific measurements of time, which focus on both micro events(at nanoparticle level) and macro-events(over billions of years). The last day of a mans life may be one of the most significant events in that life, and may even be a significant event in the History of the Polis, if ones name is Socrates, but it is an insignificant event in the cosmological measurement of time, and as such has no more meaning than the extinction of the light of a candle late at night in the polis just before gong to sleep.
Ricoeur subjects the trace to a process of dialectical reasoning in which it successively reveals or hides its meaning: a process which requires hermeneutic investigation that takes the circumspective attitude into account, in an attempt to synthesise thesis and antithesis. The idea of a trace, however, does not fare well if the synthesis of the trace combines firstly, both the conceptual transfiguration of experience we find in the form of historical documents in a historical archive and secondly, in the monumental remains of Greek Temples standing alone on barren hillsides. These two forms of the “trace” will appear to be two different forms of life or forms of Being-in-the-world, requiring different human powers for their different interpretation.