Philosophical Publications and Book Reviews – Page 2 – "The world explored, the world suffered" Philosophy Blog:-Lectures, Journals, Book Reviews, and Discussion forums(MichaelRDJames)

November 4, 2022November 6, 2022

A review of Thomas Howards Youtube lecture on T S Eliots “Four Quartets”: Part 4– A Wittgensteinian commentary

It may be true to claim that attention to both Aristotelian and Kantian Philosophy is necessary if one is to succeed in capturing the full sense or meaning of the philosophical component of Eliot’s poetry. There may, however, be, an aspect of Eliot’s poetry that remains untouched by the above philosophical interpretations(Aristotle, Kant, Freud) and that aspect is also important for our understanding and reasoning about aesthetic and religious problems.

We argued in an earlier work entitled “A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness and Action”(Lambert Academic Press, 4 volumes2019-2022) that Wittgenstein conducts investigations into the use of language in order to reveal the important role of words in the understanding of their “meaning”. Wittgenstein believes that grammatical investigations can reveal the essence of things, thus distancing himself from various modern forms of relativism, and he also insists on the objectivity of the linguistic practices that are an essential part of our communal life-world. These investigations are conducted in Greek and Kantian spirit, and seek to connect essence-specifying characterisations with both the notion of “forms of life”, and our mental capacities. Wittgenstein attempts to assemble his album of sketches into a landscape that we find our way about in. He also, we know, compared Kant’s project favourably with what he was attempting to do, but there is no acknowledgement of the Aristotelian hylomorphic idea of “forms of life”.

One of the major “revolutions” of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy involved referring to the differing philosophical significance of the different “forms of language”, e.g. descriptive, interrogative, imperative and “countless other kinds”(Philosophical Investigations, 23). These forms are viewed in terms of the way in which we master the use of these forms as a consequence of learning the language. Wittgenstein, in the context of this discussion, uses the term “technique”, and this invokes the image of “tools”: words and sentences are “tools of language” he claims. Using these tools correctly then becomes an important part of the training process, and this process connects to areté( saying the right thing at the right time in the right way in the right circumstances). Imperatives, it is argued, have both conditions of understanding and performance. For example, the imperative “We ought to keep promises”, requires both understanding of the meaning of the words, and an understanding involving the importance of doing what one has said one is going to do. These elements are part of the language game we play with imperatives which is also founded on the praise or blame of fellow language users who believe the practice of keeping promises is important for the community. Imperatives of the above kind, then can be seen as “universal maxims” or principles, related to the moral law(the categorical imperative). The logic of the language game governing individual promising consists of a set of premises that begin with a universal”necessary “ought-statement”, and continues with a premise or premises stating the facts of the matter(that Jack promised Jill he would pay the money back that he was borrowing), and a concluding premise expressing what the individual ought to (Pay the money back).

Wittgenstein also analysed the language of religious belief. He points out, for example, that a religious belief cannot be characterised as a momentary state of mind(Lectures on Religious Belief). Neither can it be characterised as the kind of belief that can be proved via the production of evidence or the giving of reasons. The “reasons” given for a religious belief differ significantly from the reasons we give for a belief such as “Jean-Paul will be grading his students at the end of this academic year.” The faith that a religious person places in the future occurrence of a Judgement Day can be defended, but the “reasons” will not “prove” the veracity of the belief. There are, however, similarities. In both cases we will expect certain kinds of behaviour/activity on the part of the believer. Without some kind of public criterion, we would not know whether we understood the meaning of what has been said. If, for example someone believes that they will not cease to exist after their death, it might be a challenge to understand exactly what they mean, even if they engage in various forms of preparatory activity for a life after death, e.g. an author who writes an autobiography, or a ruler who arranges to have certain objects placed in their grave. This draws attention to an important condition for the existence of language-games, namely, that they require a form of life constituted of a constellation of actions which are embedded in the practice of learning the use of words. The telos of this learning process is the actualisation of this linguistic knowledge in the community. Wittgenstein, in relation to the life after death question expresses the same kind of scepticism that Socrates expressed in his cell whilst awaiting the implementation of his death sentence. Socrates, we know, claimed that he did not know whether a dreamless sleep or communion with other souls in a heavenly medium, lay in the future. What he was certain of, however, was that whatever it was that was going to happen it would be something Good. Wittgenstein has this to say about “The Good”:

“What is good is divine too. That ,strangely enough, sums up my ethics”(Culture and Value 5e)

This of course is a Kantian position. Wittgenstein goes on to say:

“You cannot lead people to the good: you can only lead them to some place or other: the good lies outside the space of facts.”(5e)

This is, of course a primary strategy of Eliot’s poetry which also strives to integrate the religious belief system with our moral belief system. Eliot leads us to the places of the beginning, exile in the waste land, and finally to the end where we “know” the beginning for the first time. These places, for Eliot are the “objective correlative” that he claims is a necessary instrument for the poet to use, when it comes to the evocation of the appropriate emotions and passions connected to fundamental themes of the poem. The Garden of Eden and the Waste land are, of course, in a sense “virtual”, and not actual places, but we understand that they are creations of the productive imagination. We understand this by the way in which Eliot uses his these ideas.

Wittgenstein, in his later work, moved away from the logical positivist view of Science and toward a more humanistic position. In Culture and Value he specifically claims that Science sends us back to sleep, and he reiterates here what he has said elsewhere, namely, that the solution to scientific problems no longer interest him(cf Socrates). What is needed, Wittgenstein claims, (in Socratic and Aristotelian spirit) is that we wake up and view the world with awe and wonder. Reminding us too of the Kantian claim that :

“We may apply….to an organised being, all the laws of mechanical generation known or yet to be discovered, we may even hope to make good progress in such researches, but we can never get rid of the appeal to a completely different source of generation for the possibility of a product of this kind, namely that of a causality by ends. It is utterly impossible for human reason, or for any finite reason qualitatively resembling ours, however much it may surpass it in degree, to hope to understand the generation of even a blade of grass from mere mechanical causes.”(Critique of Judgement, Dialectic of Teleological Judgement, P.66)

The implication of the Aristotelian, Kantian and Wittgensteinian view, is that science, (with its “book of nature” commitment in which observation of the facts and the mechanical causes of phenomena is the primary concern), will not provide us with answers to the aporetic questions that arise when we attempt to understand nature. Similarly, if we view past culture with the same commitment we may reduce it to rubble and ash, but, given the complex nature of our mental capacities and the way in which they relate to the human psuche, a spirit will hover over the ashes. Eliot captures this scenario in his image of the ashes of burned roses on the sleeve of winter. Aristotle Kant and Wittgenstein all agree on the complex integration of our human capacities and powers. Wittgenstein expresses this in the following fashion:

“The treatment of all these phenomena of mental life is not of importance to me because I am keen on completeness. Rater because each one casts light on the correct treatment of all”(Zettel, 465)

It is in this spiritual space that we find “The Good” and the awe and wonder we feel in the face of the beauty and sublimity of the natural world. Kant noticed the tendency to attempt to reduce the “architectural” work that occurs in this spiritual space to rubble, and objected to this attempt in all three of his major works, but most specifically in the Critique of Judgement, where the emphasis is upon the relations of the “faculties” of imagination, understanding and reason. Wittgenstein shares many of Kant’s concerns:

“Even if it is clear to me that the disappearance of a culture does not signify the disappearance of human value but simply of certain means of expressing this value, still the fact remains that I contemplate the current of European civilisation without sympathy, without understanding its aims, if any.”(CV 9e)

Whether what Wittgenstein means here is the European penchant for viewing the world scientifically, or whether he also has in mind the “transformation” of European Philosophy since the times of Aristotle and Kant, is unclear. This view, however, fits in well with the thesis that Kantian and Aristotelian Philosophy have been, in the modern industrial world, marginalised as part of the technical and financial “march” of “progress”. A march to the drum of techné rather than the symphony orchestra of arete, areté, epistemé, diké, logos and phronesis. Music was a primary concern for Wittgenstein and we find reflections on Beethovem, Mozart, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Bruckner, Wagner and Hadyn in the writings on Culture and Value.

Wittgenstein speaks quite often about a “landscape” in relation to his philosophy, and the difficulty his pupils have in finding their way about in this philosophical terrain. He also speaks about his own work in terms of an attempt to produce an album of sketches of this landscape, regretting the fact that these sketches do not form a whole. Perhaps both Aristotle and Kant felt this way about their work too. Wittgenstein’s modernity, however, manifests itself in the following remark:

“The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It is not, e.g., absurd to believe that the scientific and technological age is the beginning of the end for humanity, that the idea of Great Progress is a bedazzlement, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known:that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that humanity, in seeking it is falling into a trap.It is by no means clear that this is not how things are.”(CV 64e)

Yet at the same time Wittgenstein is uncertain of this position, and speculates hopefully that perhaps one day our civilisation will evolve into a Culture. He focuses on a major modern concern orbiting around our modern educational systems, and claims that the education of his time was merely designed for the purpose of the pupils having a good time in the name of the Popper’s principle : “minimise suffering”. Suffering of the kind experienced by souls exiled in the waste-land (referred to by Eliot) is, Wittgenstein argues, out of date. This exemplifies for Wittgenstein, the decline of civilisation but it also connects with Kantian reflections on the importance of leading a moral life that has nothing to do with what Kant referred to as the principle of self-love in disguise, namely happiness. The Kantian moral agent, instead accepts the suffering involved in the effort to protect ones freedom and do ones duty, and they do this by, amongst other things ,bearing responsibility in relation to other peoples freedom. The saint, for Eliot obviously embodies this Kantian ideal in the way in which suffering is borne and in the way in which life is appreciated: a life lived , Eliot argues, at the intersection of time and the timeless.

November 1, 2022November 6, 2022

A Review of the youtube lecture on Eliot’s “Four Quartets by Thomas Howard: Part Three –A Freudian Commentary

Freud claimed that his Psychology was Kantian, and there is much evidence to support this claim, especially insofar as his later work was concerned. There is, however, also evidence to suggest that he did not share many of Kant’s cultural and religious convictions, even in his later work. Thanatos for Freud, together with Eros, were terms borrowed from Plato, for the purposes of characterising and diagnosing the condition of those difficult to treat patients, whose symptom-constellation was puzzling for Freud, e.g. the compulsion to repeat something traumatic seemed to lie beyond the reach of explanation in terms of the pleasure principle. Freud thus began to explore the territory beyond the pleasure principle. The postponement of immediate gratification as a life-sustaining and enhancing strategy had long been a feature of the Greek principle of areté, and it too was an important component of the Kantian criticism of the utilitarian ultimate end -goal of the “pursuit of happiness”.

The Freudian Ego was given the task of coordinating the different requirements of the life and death instinct in our sensory motor contacts with the world, and whilst pleasure played some role in this effort of coordination, it was the Reality-Principle that the ego attempted to use in most of its work. The principle worked in the spirit of areté and diké as part of the attempt to integrate the demands of the superego into a holistic harmonious mental entity. Freud characterises the death instinct as lying both behind the compulsion to repeat, and as a strategy on the part of the patient to “restore an earlier state of things”, i.e. a strategy aimed at returning the patient to a state prior to that point in their life when the trauma occurred.

The Ego’s task, in general, is to lift the subject out of the state of narcissistic love(self-love). Narcissism obviously plays a role in the Kantian account of the subject thinking about the moral law, but making himself an exception to the obligation of the imperative(which he understands but fails to fully justify). The reason it took such a long time to discover the workings of Thanatos in the psyche of his patients, (in the labyrinth of our conscious, preconscious, and unconscious systems), is that the death instinct does not announce its presence, it works silently. The desire for death, that is, manifests itself not just in the compulsion to repeat but also in the tendency toward destruction. Freud is giving more content to the oracular prophecy, relating to mans tendency to bring down ruin and destruction upon himself. This is one argument for the death instinct being an anti-cultural instinct, and the reason for this might be contained in the following:

“The element of truth behind all of this…is…that men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved and who at most can defend themselves if attacked: they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbour is for them someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus”(Civilisation and its Discontents)

The issues being discussed in the above quote are the Christian imperatives “Love thy neighbour” and “love thy enemies” and what is being expressed is clearly a cynical view resembling the cynicism of Diogenes many centuries earlier, a view which may have been inspired by the Greek oracles concern for the creations of man. The Christian and Enlightenment messages of hope are overshadowed by a form of reasoning that points to the bitter facts we all experience–that people do kill each other, and use each other as means to their own selfish(narcissistic?) ends. Freud, therefore appears, at first sight, to have grounds for his form of argumentation, and it ought to be pointed out that Eliot’s poetry post-dates Freud but a reasonable hypothesis would be that Freudianism(on the basis of Freuds writings) would respond negatively to the religion in Eliot’s poetry and positively to the philosophy. One response by Freudians would involve seeing in the poetry the suspicious workings of defence mechanisms. In the work “Moses and Monotheism” Freud states the following:

“Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But it cannot achieve its end. Its doctrines carry with them the stamp of the time in which they originated, the ignorant childhood days of the human race. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery. The ethical commands, to which to which religion seeks to lend its weight, require some other foundations instead, for human society cannot do without them and it is dangerous to link up obedience to them with religious belief. If one attempts to assign to religion its place in mans evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilised individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.”

How, we might wonder, could Freud, the Kantian psychologist be so cynical about Religion? Kant sees religious belief and activity in terms of the motivated hopes of a rational animal capable of discourse. Firstly, we ought to note that Kant inclines toward the term “respect” to characterise and justify the way in which man ought to relate himself to other men. Respect is less of a passion, and more of an intellectual attitude than Love, signifying as it does a psychological distance in relation to the object of the attitude. Kant’s imperatives, therefore, would be “respect thy neighbour”, and “respect thy enemy” and in that spirit “do unto him as thy would be done unto”

Freud speaks in the above quote of the the importance for society that peace and tranquillity reign between oneself and ones neighbours, but he is less conciliatory about our relation to our neighbours if they behave like ones enemies, believing that areté(doing the right thing at the right time in the right way) and diké(justice) must regulate such a relation rationally, without any threat of violence.

We have Freud to thank for giving us account of the curious behaviour he described as “identifying with the aggressor” by which he meant that certain people wish to become like their aggressors in order to avoid the aggression these aggressors wish to inflict upon them. This tactic does not always work with aggressors, of course, but this might be the only choice available in certain circumstances. This behaviour, for Kant, would be tantamount to giving up ones freedom and dignity, and therefore can not be regarded as in accordance with any of the formulations of the categorical imperative. The Categorical Imperative, we ought to recall, is intended to ensure that we treat everyone(including ourselves) as ends-in-themselves.

Freud sees in his postulation of an internal agency he calls the superego, a means to control mans aggression toward his fellow man. The superego, on this account, is clearly a cultural instrument to curb aggressive behaviour, and Freud describes this in terms of it functioning like a garrison in a conquered city, but given the fact that its medium of operation is guilt and this guilt is partly the cause of his discontentment with his civilisation, the superego looks to be a negative agency. It is the mature ego that transforms this situation, by assimilating the functions of the superego into itself: sublimating areté under the broader perspective of the reality principle which manifest itself in attitudes of resignation in the face of Moira(Fate). This latter is the sign of what Freud called a strong ego.

Religion appeals to a father who demands that we identify with his holiness, and obey his commandments. This state of affairs, Freud argues, is a pathological phenomenon, and is a part of the long childhood of the species of man. For Freud, it is psychoanalysis, and not Religion, that is needed to identify the pathological mechanisms that prevent or slow down the growth process toward maturity: the growth toward being fully rational.

Yet there is in the “Four Quartets” what Freud would have regarded as wisdom, especially in the closing passages which refer to explorers returning to the beginning after having arrived at the end of their journey, and knowing the place for the first time. For Freud this process would involve the the Reality Principle which is used in the reality-testing of ones representations. Freud has the following to say on this theme:

“A pre-condition for the setting up of reality-testing is that objects shall have been lost which once brought real satisfaction”(Negation, Freud)

Freud goes on to claim that the aim of reality-testing is not to find an object that is real for perception, but rather to re-find an object that has been lost. This, in its turn, involves a wish that the absent (perhaps loved) object return from a state of absence into a state of presence–an impossible state of affairs, of course in the case of the death of a loved one. In this case the re-finding of the object is impossible and a state of mourning supervenes, which ends in a state of resignation to the new state of affairs. If, in the course of our explorations, we do re-find the lost object, Eliot does not characterise this as a case for rejoicing, but rather uses the expression that we “know the place for the first time”. Using the term “know” conjures up the Kantian interpretation of the Garden of Eden narrative we referred to in a previous essay.

The Kantian message relating to the dangers of self-love is also elaborated upon by Freud in terms of a narcissism that is so self-destructive that it may, in the process of melancholia, prove destructive of the life of the self via an act of suicide. This involves the transforming of love for the self, to hate of the self, via a pathological defence mechanism in which the patent identifies with the lost object: an object which the patient may have ambiguous feelings for. In this case the death instinct returns the subject to an earlier state of things, namely an inorganic state of being.

Both Freud and Eliot believe that the so called “empire of suffering” is a vast empire overshadowing the operation of the pleasure-pain principle. Life is harsh, Freud argues, and this demands a Stoic Greek attitude which responds to the gestalt of Ananke rather than a utilitarian calculation of how to avoid the calculus of pain. The important part of this Greek response is the battle against illusion which is fought by embracing the knowledge of “The Good”—the foremost “Form” in Plato’s “Theory of Forms”. Freud’s response to the problems posed by the harshness of life is to evoke the “god” of “Logos” to assist us in the task of living. This too, can be seen as a rejection of the enthusiasm of Eliot and Kant for a divine author of the world. Logos assists us, in particular, to resolve what Freud refers to as the Oedipus complex of the species, enabling us to face up to the work that needs to be done more realistically— a project free from illusion and delusion. We are thus enabled via Logos to resign ourselves to Ananke, and in the process acquire a view of the world which is “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”. We should recall here that the death of Socrates was in accordance with such a world view. Socrates viewed death as a Good, whether it be a dreamless sleep or a meeting of souls in a heavenly medium.

Art, is treated much more sympathetically than Religion in Freud’s writings. We have noted that Religion, on Freud’s view is riddled with pathological defence mechanisms, e.g. the compulsion to repeat(rituals) identification with the aggressor(the angry punishing God of the OT), the return of the repressed(our original sin) etc. Art , on the other hand is:

“the non-obsessional, non-neurotic form of substitute satisfaction”

Freud sees the defence mechanism of “sublimation”as harnessing our creative instincts in the name of Eros, a process which involves the postponement of satisfaction for Cultural purposes. The sensible power of the imagination inserted in the work of fantasy, however, is the medium for this artistic activity. Aristotle, in the context of this discussion, claims that the dramatist and the poet seek ultimately to produce a learning experience upon which supervenes a feeling of pleasure. Kant’s account of the creative is marginally more complex, referring to what he calls the “harmony of the faculties of the imagination and understanding”. There is, in this rather pleasant process, no great suffering requiring an attitude of resignation at the end: the work of art does not resemble the work of life in that respect. Indeed it is meant as the sketch of a solution to the problem of the harshness of life. Kant argues that the harmony of the faculties prepares the mind for the tasks of morality and he claims that beauty is the “symbol” of morality.

There is, in Freuds writings on Religion no reference to the kerygma or “call” of religion even if there is acknowledgement that it has served the purposes of culture in the past. There are, however references to both Plato and Kant in his later work. Epistemé, in the form of knowledge of the principles of psychoanalysis, complements the techné of therapeutic techniques, and it is clear that the Reality Principle is not merely an epistemological principle, but also requires the knowledge of “the Good” both Plato and Aristotle referred to in their reflections. Socrates, in his cell, waiting for the hour of his death, was resigned to his fate, and his knowledge of areté, logos, and diké were operative right up to the moment at which he was losing consciousness: a moment in which his last thought was to ask for a sacrifice to be made on his behalf to the Medical God, Aeschylus. Presumably this last gesture was a form of thanksgiving for “the good ” death that was about to occur. The last act of Socrates was, therefore, a religious act. Socrates was not as free as Freud felt, close to his death in England, after fleeing from the Nazis, but both figures represented in their different ways the importance of Logos and Ananke in approaching the end of their “examined lives”. Socrates died from a dose of hemlock and Freud from an overdose of morphine, so perhaps the final gesture of Socrates was not in vain and a prophecy of things to come.

Freud, the medical doctor, launches two specific attacks upon religion, the first against religious belief explaining the nature of the illusion involved in some of the elements of the system. The second attack is upon religious practice, especially the ritualistic aspect, which probably includes the communion of the Catholic mass. Illusions of religion connect to the capacity for desire, and Freud reflects upon the pathological character of various forms of self-fulfilment. It is also important to note that the Freudian criticism is not limited to analysing monotheism, but is intended to question all forms of religion, including the polytheism of earlier religions. It is not truth or knowledge that is at issue in many of his reflections, but rather the efficacy of religion in the economics of renunciations and satisfactions in the lives of men. Freud is well aware that the mere claim that both religious belief and religious rituals are pathological and fantasy-laden, is not sufficient criticism of these activities from a psychoanalytical point of view. In his criticism, Freud maintains that religion has both neurotic and psychotic components, but it is the latter element that he focuses upon in his analysis of the psychological mechanism of projection and its involvement in the construction of a spiritual world. We know that in his work “The Future of an Illusion” Freud claimed the origins of civilisation to be rooted in coercion and what he calls the “renunciation” of the instincts and he further doubts whether man has the capacity for organising society without the use of the above problematic methods.

Kant draws an important distinction between Civilisation and Culture and for him the latter is part of the project of actualising the potentialities of man, especially his rationality and freedom. We find a suggestion of this in Eliot’s “In my beginning is my end”, and in other reflections on wisdom, but Freud rejects this distinction between civilisation and culture, and like Diogenes in the dark shines a lamp upon the face of civilisation, only to conclude that it might not be worth the effort man puts into it. To sustain a culture, as conceived of by Kant, requires a considerable amount of work over a long, long period of time(one hundred thousand years). At the end of this process, Kant argues, man will find himself in a kingdom of ends. Freud’s response this would have been to simply point out that man is not fond of work, preferring instead to acquiesce to his passions. For the Greeks this work took place in the spirit of areté and diké and the Greeks were more positive than Freud on the issue of the possible control of the passions and the power of knowledge and work to bring cultural benefits. Kant, of course pointed out that even though man needs to have his passions controlled, he does not always want this to happen.Man, as a consequence does the minimum amount of work necessary to sustain his civilisation, but perhaps not enough to hasten his one hundred thousand year journey toward the kingdom of ends. He also is prepared to work because of his knowledge of what life is like in a state of nature without the benefits of living in a society.

In the early days of our communal existence Freud reflects upon the magical thinking that was used in the spirit of animism and he criticises this on the grounds of a failure of knowledge of oneself and ones capacities(epistemé). This quest for self-knowledge is part of Eliot’s project as can be seen in his earlier poetry, e.g. “The love song of J Alfred Prufrock”:

“No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.”

Prufrock, as Howard points out des not wish to be troubled by the question “What is it?” which is perhaps necessary if one, for example, wishes to understand ones relation to Time. Prufrock is the “patient ” wondering through half deserted streets, streets which lead to the posing of an overwhelming question for someone who measures out their life in coffee spoons. The poem animates even the fog into a cat-like creature, and creates a spiritual world in which death is personified without any mention of religion or God. Dante, however, provides a prelude to the poem. Sometimes in religious texts, a spiritual world is projected with more than a hint of paranoia(an angry and punishing Chronos or Yahweh) but Freud notes that in the case of the Greek gods, they were all subject to Moira or Fate and the oracles and poets believed that the gods too were subject to the demands of areté and diké. Freud highlights that, in the transition from animism to this latter state of affairs, there was a transition in which the people longed for a lost father– a longing that was in certain cases mixed with fear.

Freud notes that during his times, God was becoming an insubstantial shadow, as man began to become aware of the role his own powers played in the construction of his ideas and ideals. Kant, too, would have suspected that his own criticism of religion might result in such consequences, but his criticism was not a part of the wave of the technical progress of science. Rather, for Kant, his critique was a part of a growing realisation that God might indeed be an idea that is related to the power of practical reasoning about the moral order of the world. Freud, on the other hand, was a part of the wave of a science that appealed to a conception of theoretical reasoning, denying many categories of understanding/judgement and the critical application of the principles of reasoning. This rejection favoured sensory forms of contact with an essentially sensory world. This rejection would have been part of an illusory form of argumentation for Kant. He would not, that is, have subscribed to the modern emphasis upon the powers of perception and observation and the formulation of imaginative hypotheses based on pure sensory data. His view of sciences was tied to a world conception that rejects the view that the world is, as the early Wittgenstein put the matter, a totality of facts. Kant would have, in the context of this kind of debate, raised significant questions about how scientists believed we understand ought-statements, such as “Promises ought to be kept”. The argument that because, some or even many promises are not kept, that this fact suffices to challenge the universality and necessity of such a judgement and place it in a category of wish-fulfilments rather than with the fulfilment of ones obligations, would not have been accepted as a good argument by Kant This is not a valid form of argumentation and the Kantian objection to it is simple: theoretical statements are about a world that is so much more than a totality of facts, they are about a world that is categorically understood and rationally explained/justified. The explanations/justifications we espouse theoretically, are about events and their causation, and this is of a different kind compared to the explanations/justifications of judgements relating to the free actions of individuals and the activities of institutions. Wish-fulfilment judgements such as “I wish a particular promise would be kept”, are, in Kant’s system, a form of judgement regulated by the principle of happiness (the principle of self-love in disguise). Such judgements pay no role in the system of moral judgments we make about the moral order of the world. A politicians promises, of course could be of either of the above kinds of judgements, either a moral judgement or a judgement that is designed to ensure retention of power and position.

Freud agrees in the Future of an Illusion that Religion has served man well but many are nevertheless discontent and this has contributed both to feelings associated with a lost or absent God(Deus absconditus) and the accompanying response of “Good riddance!”. Freuds solution to the vacuum left by the retreat of the influence of religion is that we ought to embrace the god of Logos who has respect for the Reality Principle and never promises too much.

October 30, 2022October 30, 2022

Youtube review of Thomas Howards “Reader’s Guide to the Four Quartets”: Part Two: A Kantian commentary.

“Oh do not ask “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit

These two lines of “The love song of J Alfred Prufrock” lead Eliot in his Four Quartets to an “overwhelming question”, requiring both religious and philosophical answers. In the context of this discussion we ought not to forget two important facts: firstly,Eliot converted to Anglo- Catholicism with is rituals, smells and bells, and secondly, he also wrote a doctorate on the Philosophy of Bradley, the idealist. In relation to this latter fact we can clearly see traces of Bradley’s interests in Eliot’s poetry, in spite of the fact that Eliot, like many academic philosophers of the time, rejected the metaphysics of the Absolute.

The thesis of this review, however, is that Eliot’s poetry can be seen to fall into a tradition of thought extending from Aristotle, through Kant, Freud, and the later work of Wittgenstein (and some of their followers). Kant, undoubtedly is concerned with the question Prufrock does not wish to address, but he is less concerned with consulting “experience” and its consequences. Kant, we know, was a rationalist, and like Bradley, would have rejected the idea of the absolute proposed by his critic Hegel. Kant would also have rejected the role of “experience” in empiricist accounts of the relation of man to Being, or Reality.

The question “What is Time?” for example, is not answered by Kant in Newtonian fashion via an appeal to absolute and relative Time. Kant instead, elaborates upon the Aristotelian answer to the above question, and regards Time as a medium of change which was defined by Aristotle as “the measurement of motion in terms of before and after”. Kant’s elaboration upon this seemingly “objective” definition takes the form of :

“time is nothing but the subjective condition under which alone intuition can take place in us. For that being so, this form of intuition can be represented prior to the objects, and therefore a priori.”(Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. trans by Kemp Smith, N.,London, Macmillan, 1963)

Time, on this account is the:

“form of inner sense, that is, the intuition of ourselves and of our inner state(A41)…It has to do neither with shape nor position, but with the relation of representations in our inner state”(A,33, B50)

The “relation” referred to here is that of “before and after”, and this is the condition of seeing, for example, the motion of a boat sailing downstream. Kant is, notwithstanding the above remarks, very clear about the universal validity of Time, which he conceives of as both empirically real and transcendentally ideal( being, as it is, an a priori condition of experience in general)

Both Time and Space, Kant argues, are “sources” of knowledge and can be related to the Mathematics of number and geometry. Indeed all truths about our experience of the world presuppose the sensible relation we have to Time and Space. Kant’s account of consciousness surely includes this region of sensibility, in which the imagination plays an important role in, for example, the unity of apperception where representations are combined and separated. Kant specifically has this to say on the theme of consciousness:

“The consciousness of self(apperception) is the simple representation of the “I” and if all that is manifold in the subject were given by the activity of the self, the inner intuition would be intellectual.”B 68)

This means that intuition is the sensible capacity for receiving representations and the objects of these representations are given to us in this mode of cognition. Time, then, is a sensible potentiality, but nevertheless it is a necessary a priori vicissitude of consciousness(which, for Eliot is not in time but rather a condition of time). Time past and time future meet in the present, Eliot argues. For Aristotle and Kant, it is consciousness of before and after that is important for the measurement of change, which is always given via motion of some kind. The use of the mathematical number system to quantify otherwise qualitative experiences of “before and after”, allows man to collectively lift himself out of the now of the present, and thereby make it possible to organise, not just his own daily life, but also the institutions of society.

Eliot’s opening lines can, without doubt be regarded as a reflection on the logos of time. He is clearly responding in a philosophical way to the question “What is it?” The depth of his response to this question is therefore best measured in terms of philosophical criteria. Kant’s account insists we are in immediate relation to phenomena via our intuition, and what is meant by the term “phenomenon is designated best by the Greek verb which means ” to show itself”. This in turn relates to the Greek term for “truth” which is aletheia, a term that Heidegger claims relates us to Being in a fundamental way. The “Phenomenon” Kant uses to illustrate our intuitive relation to the world, is that of a ship sailing downstream on a river. We see the motion of the ship, and immediately measure it in terms of “before and after”. Yet it is not this everyday consciousness of time that Eliot seeks to explicate. He appears to be mostly concerned with the unity of apperception of the representations of this phenomenon, more interested, that is, in the time of my life(the beginning and the end). This aspect of time is more the concern of the “I think” than the “I perceive”. Eliot is reflecting on the relation between the past, present, and future, in particular insofar as ones conception and death is concerned. The Book of Ecclesiastes is the inspiration for a number of lines in the poem. East Coker carries the message that even if there is a time for every purpose under heaven, humanity appears to be fully engaged with the project of self destruction. There are clearly echoes in this biblical work of the Greek oracles prophecy that “Everything created by man is destined for ruin and destruction”. Eliot attempts to spatialise our experience of time via the mathematical image of a spinning object and the postulate that there is a still point at the geometrical centre of this spinning mass that does not spin. That it is not mathematics that Eliot is concerned with, becomes obvious in his claim that the dance of life is occurring at this still point of the present where past and future meet.

Mathematics gives way to science and art as the poem proceeds to evoke the image of a “wounded surgeon” who uses “sharp compassion” to heal his tumored patients. Howard interprets this in terms of an implied reference to “the Great Physician”, who fulfils the prophecy “All shall be well and all manner if things shall be well”. This image then gives way to a reflection on the meaning of the catholic mass, where the startling savage image of the drinking of the blood of Christ and the eating of his flesh appears in some sense to be occurring.

The poem ends with Little Gidding, the final quartet, and the final moments take us back to our beginnings in the Garden of Eden. We are, Eliot argues, the explorers who, have after a long journey, arrived back at our origins with the awareness that we now “know the place for the first time”. This is particularly relevant for any Aristotelian/Kantian interpretation of the meaning of the Garden of Eden narrative. In this context, it ought to be pointed out that both Aristotle and Kant prioritise areté and epistemé in their different but related accounts of the Origin of History and mankind. On the Biblical account, Adam(the ruined millionaire on Howards interpretation), evokes the wrath and punishment of God, because he failed to understand mans place or position in the divine order of things. On a hylomorphic/critical reading of this tale of the genesis of man, Adam is an explorer who places his faith in the fruit of the tree of knowledge to take man to the end of his journey and enable a dignified return to his beginnings. For Kant, it is clear that Adam was exercising his freedom in this critical moment in Time, and this was a celebrated moment for the History of mankind.

Paradoxically, it may seem, it is Kantian Philosophy and its battery of arguments outlining the limitations of knowledge and the necessity of faith, that permit us to view Eliot’s poetry through the prism of Kantian Philosophy. The reference to the doctrine of trans-substantiation, of course, raises philosophical issues, and Kant would be skeptical of any identity claim relating to the bread and wine and blood and flesh of Christ. Perhaps Kant would agree to a “symbolic” relation between these entities. In the context of this discussion it is important to recall that a symbol for Kant is not a conceptual mode of representation but merely an intuitive mode of representation which we use to evoke concepts via a law of association : a law that operates when we make conscious connections between different entities. There is, in other words, an analogical relation between the blood and the wine, the flesh and the communion wafer.

Insofar as our knowledge of God is concerned we can only think the ideas of God, immortality of the soul, and Freedom, and this form of thought is best embedded in a metaphysics of morals rather than a metaphysics of nature. Insofar as God is concerned, Kant argues, the only viable argument for the existence of God, is as a moral author of the world, an author whose will is divinely holy, and which I as a human being must imitate in my chosen actions, if I am to be saved. This holy will is part of the noumenal world which we can only access through our moral belief system. Kant’s argument here is clearly “anti-utilitarian”, and takes the form of a system of imperatives rather a system of facts. These imperatives are expressed in ought-judgments, e.g. “Promises ought to be kept”, and “We ought to respect the freedom of all men”. This imperative system is end- or telos-related and refers to ultimate moral ends, which of necessity must be unconditionally accepted. The fact, for example, that man desires to be happy, and believes in a variety of means to achieve such happiness, is irrelevant for Kant, who sees in happiness the principle of self-love in disguise. Such a solipsistic solution to one of the central problems of morality would be self-defeating for Critical Philosophy. Instead Kant argues, in the spirit of Aristotle, that the telos or end of the imperative system of judgements is, the good spirited flourishing life(eudaimonia), and this brings with it ethical duties and obligations which must be respected. If, these duties and obligations become an integral part of ones life we may have faith that the end will supervene as part of the divine plan of the moral author of the world.

The narratives we possess of the life of Jesus are, of course, an attempt to ground the above abstract account of the genesis and meaning of life in a concrete life-story. Kant is on the record for approving of such narratives, but reserving judgement on the super-natural events and happenings reported. Kant is also, incidentally on record with his disapproval of various clerical ceremonial rituals(.e.g. the smells and bells of the mass) but he nevertheless believes that the church as an institution plays a very important role in the improvement of society. It is therefore a reasonable supposition that he would have approved of Eliot’s poetry on similar grounds, especially considering Eliot’s shared scepticism of appeals to supernatural causes and forces in the phenomena of horoscopes, seances, tarot card readings, etc. Eliot’s metaphors are often more Kantian than Bradleyian when he is referring to the moral author of the world. Eliot, in a sense, may be less hopeful than Kant for the future of humanity, and it is difficult to say what he might have thought about the postulated cosmopolitan “kingdom of ends”. Eliot sometimes appears to count himself as one of the Freudian “discontents” insofar as his judgement on the progress of civilisation is concerned, given the decline in cultural standards that appeared to him to accompany the wave of secularisation sweeping across the world. A clue to his position on this issue is given in his work”The Idea of a Christian Society”:

“However bigoted the announcement may sound, the Christian can be satisfied with nothing less than a Christian organisation of society–which is not the same thing as a society consisting exclusively of devout Christians. It would be a society in which the natural end of man–virtue and well being in community-is acknowledged for all, and the supernatural end–beautitude–for those who have the eyes to see it.”(ICS pp33-4)

Beauty, for Kant, we know is subjective, but it is nevertheless important for the cultural development of man, a telos that is manifested in the insistence that when we speak about something being beautiful, we speak with a “universal voice”—demanding agreement from fellow perceivers of the beautiful object. More importantly, Kant regards the soul to be enriched by experiences of beauty, given its trinity of capacities: capacity to know, capacity to feel pleasure or pain, and capacity for desire. The latter two capacities have obvious connections to one another. The judgement of beauty, however, is disinterested, and possesses a form of finality connected to the immediate feeling of pleasure which, in its turn, is related to the feeling of a good-spirited flourishing life. The ground of the pleasure we feel for beautiful phenomena is a harmony of the faculties of imagination and understanding, a harmony which in its turn prepares the mind for intellectual conceptual activity in accordance with the discipline of the categories and the discipline of the various sciences(theoretical, practical, and productive).

We find ourselves, in contemplating beauty, attempting to orient ourselves in a world of reflection and contemplation, but in a non-conceptual form which involves a more intuitive form of consciousness. This form of consciousness also feels the need to communicate ones mental state to others— a form of consciousness based on the feeling of pleasure and the harmony of the faculties which most of us experience in relation to the experience of the reading of Eliot’s “Four Quartets”.

What we find beautiful in a work of art, then, is its design insofar as this manifests the harmony of the faculties and the subsequent supervening of the feeling of pleasure. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” obviously meets the Kantian criteria we have for judgments of taste related to works of art. It is doubtful , however, whether Kant would have approved of using similar criteria to validate religious judgements, which, in his view, were regulated by practical reason .

Kant , in his work “Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason”, speaks of the role of faith in the true church, which he believes is based on universal values. He argues in the context of this discussion against what he refers to as a form of “faith in vicarious satisfaction”(P.124) which may have been the target of the Freudian criticism of religion. Genuine satisfaction, Kant argues, is encountered in true believers in the moral author of the world, in the form of Grace, which in turn is an important element of a life that is led with respect for the moral law and a respect for duty. Kant is careful to point out, however that ecclesiastical faith(which presumably Eliot thought important), is not as important as the faith that is associated with the universal/philosophical religion which is “Religion within the bounds of mere reason”. Tales of miracles abound in historical accounts of the life of Jesus, and these are taken seriously by the ecclesiastical church. The true church, on the other hand, Kant argues, will remain sceptical to the accounts of supernatural events and the true church would have also been appalled by many of the modern day scandals associated with the priesthood of the ecclesiastical church. The true church does however acknowledge the importance of a Canon of important events and deeds that can be used for the purposes of establishing what Kant calls a “Kingdom of Ends”–a union of the many into one. Gods role in this moral process remains a mystery, but no more of a mystery than Newtons gravitational force(P 141, ftnt.) The law of gravity can nevertheless be cognised as can divine and moral law. It is the causes that remain unknown to us. Divine and holy law can, however, be thought and deserve the faith we place in such laws. Insofar as our religious mysteries are concerned, revelation reveals enough through scripture and our reasoning about the scriptures(P145) to our understanding and judgement and this justifies the universality and necessity of our communication in relation to such mysteries.

Howard touches upon the mystery of mysteries which concerns both the nature of time and our mortality, namely, the end of time. For many Christians there will be an end of time when God will convene a tribunal and pass judgement upon humanity . The judgement will be either one of damnation or Grace. The jury may already be out on this question, considering its verdict. In this context, there are so called monists, who believe in the positive judgement of grace, and dualists who believe some will be saved and some will be damned. In this tribunal the love of God for man will also be tested as will the love of God by man. Above all, what will be tested is the oracles prophecy that “Everything created by man is destined for ruin and destruction”. Eliot is acutely aware of the impending judgement day and therefore insists that wisdom demands the humility of man.

October 26, 2022

A review of the Youtube lecture : “Readers Guide to Eliot’s “Four Quartets”: 1. Aristotelian interpretation of Eliot

white candles in candelabrum decorated with ball of flowers — Photo by Piotr Arnoldes on Pexels.com

What is fascinating in the reading given above, is that it is given by a devout catholic, but there are Aristotelian, Kantian Freudian, and Wittgensteinian themes that are in turns explored. I intend in this first part of my review to explore some of the themes of four quartets from a Hylomorphic Aristotelian point of view referring to Aristotle’s “Poetics”, “Metaphysics”, and “On the Soul”.

Aristotle begins his work on “Poetics”(The Literary Arts) by promising reference to “first principles” and the “plot” of a work which is categorically an imitation of reality by means of language. Man, we are told, learns through imitation and takes delight in such imitations, even if we are being confronted by a narrative of the most terrible scenes of, for example, the Pelopennesian War. Aristotle, with what we mean by poetry in mind, also refers to “metre”. and “Rhythm”, techniques which Eliot uses in varying degrees. For Aristotle, it is Homer who is the paradigm artist whose objects are the actions of men better than us, but there are also tragedians such as Aristophanes whose objects are the actions of men better than us but with significantly flawed characters. We know Eliot was also a playwright but his poetry unusually contains characters such as J Alfred Prufrock, Tiresias, the fisher-king, fishermen, and travellers using Public transport.

Pity and Fear, the traditional cathartic elements of Greek tragedy are important elements of Eliot’s writings and are used to move us toward the “overwhelming question”–the Platonic and Aristotelian ideas of the Good:

“Every Art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at some good: and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim”(Aristotle NE 1: 1094a 1-3)

Add to this remark that, in the Metaphysics, it is claimed “All men desire to know”, as well as the claim of Aristotle that the most difficult kind of knowledge man can acquire is knowledge of the soul, then we can perhaps begin to fathom the depth of difficulty of Eliot’s poetry. The end of the four quartets(Little Gidding) claims that all things will be well and all manner of things will be well on the conditions of simplicity and giving up everything(e.g. ones life):

A condition of complete simplicity

(Costing not less than everything)

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flames are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one.

Eliot had earlier claimed that the death and logos of fire was to be consumed by fire. For this to end in a rose of fire is, of course, a long way from the peace and tranquility of the garden(the natural home of the rose), which, apart from its mythical significance, enables us to be distracted from distraction by distraction. The garden develops into the fiery city which we built after wandering in the desert waste land. Gardening is, of course, an activity we engage in , in our cities, and it is one form in which sublimation transforms our pity and fear into something else, but this nevertheless is a Good Aristotelian end to an unpromising beginning(our animal nature). The cost of achieving this end, of course is not less than everything: a simple equation for Eliot. For Aristotle and Kant, the achievement of the good required not merely the desire for the good, but also considerable effort in accordance with the ideas of areté(virtuous activity: doing the right thing at the right time in the right way) and epistemé(knowledge). Eudaimonia or the good-spirited flourishing life would be the result of a lifetimes desire and work. In Tragedy and Epic there is a beginning a middle and an end in which thought and action is the focus of the movement of the plot. Eliots images are sometimes dramatic but insofar as thought is concerned they seem always to be reaching for the formulation and solution to an “overwhelming question” related to life and death.

Thomas Howards recommendation that Eliot’s images ought not to be construed as “symbolic” but more straightforwardly as a “case in point”, is a useful piece of advice if one is to avoid the more exotic metaphysical interpretations of his work. Thinking, for Eliot, as for Aristotle, is irrevocably tied up with spoken discourse. Aristotle defines the essence of being human as being a rational animal capable of discourse, and Eliot claims there are 4 kinds of thinking, namely, discourse with others, discourse with one other, discourse with oneself, and finally discourse with God (reported in Northrop Frye’s “T S Eliot(Edinburgh, Oliver and Boyd, 1963, P.34). Eliot weaves thought and action in his plot in accordance with Aristotelian “Form” that is a potentiality for the human form of life, namely, that we are, a form in which our being is always a question for us. Aristotle claims in the poetics:

“The end is everywhere the chief thing.”(Poetics 1450a: 22)

The role of language, for Aristotle is clear. The poet, he claims, does not describe things that have happened, but rather the possible kind of thing that can happen which can be either the probable or necessary outcome of the series of events recounted in the plot. Eliot, like all good catholics, believes in “salvation” and in “being born again” through the right kind of self-knowledge. This may be one meaning of the image “And the fire and the rose are one”. Thomas Howard offers us an Aristotelian hylomorphic “image” of an acorn harbouring the oak within as a potentiality, requiring simple conditions, and demanding a complete transformation of its substance into something completely different, i.e. the acorn sacrifices its being for the end of being a majestic oak. The hylomorphic message is that all life forms, being mortal, share this hylomorphic feature with the acorn. The human life form, for both Aristotle and Eliot, however, is unique in its ability to attempt to understand immortality and hope for divine”everlasting life” as part of its brief sojourn in this world. These “intimations of immortality” do not tolerate distractions or the guesses of horoscopes, palm readers, tarot card readers, but rather, require the eye and hand of a surgeon and his “sharp compassion”(not to mention his knowledge) which saves life. Eliots poetry is meant in this spirit.

Earth, Air, Water and Fire are also Aristotelian elements which together with the processes of hot and cold, wet and dry “form” our environment and its cyclical weather patterns which begin and end and begin again, ad infinitum, like an ever turning wheel:

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

(East Coker: 1)

Thomas Howard rightly claims that “Four Quartets” is a work about “time”. “There is a time for everything under heaven”, we learn from Ecclesiastes, and we are reminded here of Wittgenstein’s investigations into the limits of language, and its attempts to bewitch our intellects with nonsensical questions such as “Is it 5 o clock on the sun?” Time, for Aristotle, was defined as the “measurement of motion in terms of before and after”, and implied in this account, is that this motion is, of course, measured by the motion of heavenly bodies such as the sun. The sun, in this scenario, becomes the still point of the turning world ,which does not move. It becomes something like an “unmoved mover”. We humans are not cyclical beings that can return from the ashes and begin again. This poignant fact wounds our hope for immortality: a wound which no surgeons science and art can address. Houses, however can continue over centuries(The house of Windsor) and this allows us to invest our hopes for a better world in our children, whilst sheltering from the un-compassionate wind. But the winds of destruction will eventually remove even these houses. The idea of what might be, however, lead poets to write poems about the rise of houses, and the reversal of fortunes that befall them. These writings might even outlast these houses and this might also be true of historical accounts which preserve the memory of dead families and their activities in a spirit of “sharp compassion”. Aristotle claims that it is the task of the poet to “put the actual scene as far as possible before his eyes”(Poetics 1455a 22-3).

One question that ought to put to Eliot is whether his is a dramatic tragedy(confining itself to one story) or an epic attempting to tell several stories. Four Quartets, we maintain, is intended as a whole, and the story is the story or logos of man, the so-called “rational animal capable of discourse”. The story begins with the trees of life and knowledge in a garden, and ends in a garden where the task is to strive for a good-spirited flourishing life in the face of multiple distractions: a striving where one is prepared to risk ones life( through wondering in the desert- waste-land) for the life to come, and the sight of the descending dove and heavenly descending fire.

Eliot projects his sense of space and place in this work using Virgil and Dante rather than the more temporally oriented Greek Philosophers, who saw clearly the limitations of materialistic explanations of the phenomena associated with psuche. His sense of time is best expressed in The Dry Salvages where the voices of the Gods are intimated:

The sea has many voices,
Many gods and many voices.
The salt is on the briar rose,
The fog is in the fir trees.
The sea howl
And the sea yelp, are different voices
Often together heard: the whine in the rigging,
The menace and caress of wave that breaks on water,
The distant rote in the granite teeth,
And the wailing warning from the approaching headland
Are all sea voices, and the heaving groaner
Rounded homewards, and the seagull:
And under the oppression of the silent fog
The tolling bell
Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried
Ground swell, a time
Older than the time of chronometers, older
Than time counted by anxious worried women
Lying awake, calculating the future,
Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel
And piece together the past and the future,
Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
The future futureless, before the morning watch
When time stops and time is never ending;
And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,
Clangs
The bell.

(Dry Salvages 1)

The river has a beginning, a middle and an end and the end is the sea whose movement is cyclical, moving in toward the land or up the river and out to sea again, ad infinitum. The time of the sea is not our time, it “measures” time differently. The river is within us and the sea is all about us, Eliot claims, but it is the silent saint, and not the oracle or the philosopher who keeps the secret of Time, a secret intimated by the voice of the sea crying out only when the ground swell heaves the groaner and the bell. This is far from the arena of civilisation and the fiery city which requires areté and epistemé from the city dwellers(the firemen).This fiery city is the arena for human activity aiming at the good, and it is the space where memory leaves its traces sedimented: traces such as city walls that seem even to withstand the winds sweeping over the hills and the sea. The traces of Rome are preferred by Eliot to the traces of Athens or Jerusalem. Individual salvation appears to be preferred to the salvation of the city or civilisation, which the military Janus worshipping Romans failed to provide. Man is a political animal, Aristotle argued, but arché played the fundamental role in determining the importance of laws and the establishment of diké. The city, for Aristotle, is an organic phenomenon because the city, as Socrates observed, is the soul(psuche) writ large. The earthly city we know ,for Augustine, contain the seeds of its ruin and destruction: a state of affairs that the Delphic oracle warned the philosophers about(everything created by men is doomed to ruin and destruction). The Catholic view is that it is De Civitate Dei that we, who are saved, wish to dwell in. It is in this Delphic Prophecy that the Greek and the Christian message of man being a sinner correlate. For the Greeks, however, it is not the “smells and bells “, rituals, and mystery of the mass that will rescue civilisation, but rather areté epistemé and diké. The images of the scenes of modern life that we find in both “The Waste Land” and “Four Quartets” are, of course provided in the Freudian spirit of “Civilisation and its Discontents”, and they are meant to function as Thomas Howard points out, as “cases in point” of the lack of meaning in the modern world. Yet these images are all images of De Civitate Terrana, and as such prove nothing for the spiritual being who seeks to live in De Civitate Dei. As Aristotle pointed out in his “Poetics”:

“The poet being an imitator just like the painter or other maker of likenesses, he must necessarily in all instances represent things in one or other of three aspects, either as they were or are, or as they are said or thought to be or to have been,, or as they ought to be.All this he does in language…..”(Poetics 1460b 25 8-11)

The ought-use of language is not to be confused with the hypothetical-use in which one abandons ones representation upon being confronted with the facts of the matter, e.g. death is said or represented to be an evil, but this is abandoned as soon as one witnesses the relation of Socrates to his own death and what he said about it. The ought-use of language is, as Kant maintained, categorical, and is rather used to evaluate contrary representations in order to pass judgements upon them, e.g. “One ought to keep promises” This universal judgement does not fall as a principle of action just because a king or politician breaks a promise they have made. In such a case, we judge the action of breaking the promise to be evil, or unlawful, and retain our representation of the good that is achieved by keeping a promise one has made. Eliot is using language in accordance with all three of the above “aspects”, and we ought not to confuse one aspect with another, as Wittgenstein would have pointed out in relation to the language games of reporting and the language game of promising. The “temporal city” is based on laws, made not in a hypothetical spirit ,but in a categorical spirit typical of the spirit of diké. Solon, for example, passed laws which categorically freed the poor from their enslavement by the rich, and began the project of “building the middle class” which is continuing to this day in the Aristotelian spirit of the “golden mean”. Both Solon and Aristotle were aiming at the Good which resembles De Civitate Dei, a state of civilisation many hundred thousand years in the future , if we are to believe Kant and his vision of the cosmopolitan society of the “Kingdom of Ends”.

Both Aristotle and Kant assumed that the city-state was an organic hylomorphic phenomenon maturing over time, and consequently assuming different forms over time in accordance with a potentiality requiring the occurrence of particular circumstances before actualising that potential. Like all organisms, and all human activity, it aimed at the Good in spite of the difficulty in achieving an identity of what was good in itself with what was good in its consequences. This lack of identity is behind the Delphic prophecy that “everything created by man is destined for ruin and destruction”. Man is not as fully rational as he ought to be, and therefore his city-states are not as stable as they ought to be, but he is not naturally sinful as a species , as would be the case if he intended evil in his actions. He lacks both the knowledge and the reasoning power to ensure the creation of the kingdom of ends, at this point in time, but both the principles of knowledge and reason are within his grasp and his understanding. Much of Eliot’s “Four Quartets” can be read as an attempt to free us from our current imprisonment in the current forms of De civitate terrana, by establishing the conditions for the existence of De civitate dei which would be described as fundamental for the good-spirited flourishing life(eudaimonia).

Aristotle’s “on the Soul”, is a response to the Delphic Challenge to “know thyself”, and whereas one can argue that popular religious descriptions of the soul as being detachable from the body at the point of death(so called substance dualism) is anathema to the hylomorphic account which focuses instead upon a deeper understanding of “substance”. Substance, in Aristotle’s earlier work, is primarily related to particulars characterised in terms of a “this something”. In his later work “substance” is characterised more in terms of “logos” or an account/essence of the thing, as a result of some kind of investigation motivated by a desire to understand the world as such. It is not curiosity about the particular species of frogs which prompts our investigations into them in the form of observing their behaviour and dissecting them to observe their organ systems, but rather a desire to understand the world as such via universal principles(arché). It is principles we seek after in our attempts to subsume all the facts we know about frogs under an essence specifying characterisation or definition. This investigation is prompted by a conviction that the psuche of a frog is to a great extent determined by its organ and limb system. It is to be distinguished from systems of nutrition/reproduction such as living plants, by the fact that plants do not experience “sensation”, and therefore cannot be said to “perceive” anything in their world. For Aristotle, such investigations will attempt to determine the powers of the plant and the frog, and will reveal that both plants and frogs do not have sufficiently complex “organ” systems to support the more complex powers such as “being capable of discourse” and “rationality”. This kind of biological investigation led by Aristotle was, of course a precursor to that led by Darwin in his attempt to understand questions such as natural selection and the evolution of the species of animals. Both thinkers had to be wary of popular religious theories of the origin of man.

Eliot’s references to the “voices” of the gods of the sea and the river, and the significance of fire and the rose do not necessarily constitute an “imaginative” anthropomorphisation of a physical nature, which, for Aristotle, is better characterised in terms of the potentiality for being perceived, understood, and theorised about. This kind of understanding of the logos of potentiality surpasses the mere striving to legitimate “facts” via a use of language that attempts to “picture” the world. For Aristotle the “powers” of understanding and reason demand, not just the production of particular truths, but knowledge(justified true belief) such as the knowledge we have of the human soul, which he believes is satisfactorily characterised by the essence specifying definition “rational animal capable of discourse”. In such an account, the relation to the external world is a relation to a world of matter which is a world of actuality and potentiality at various levels which also varies in relation to the different powers of perception or thought. In Aristotle’s account, God is a different kind of Being in comparison to man, insofar as we are concerned, and is to be characterised more in terms of the kind of thinking God is capable of than his ability to create and shape a physical universe and its contents. This latter view of God as a craftsman would, in the view of Aristotle, be an unnecessary anthropomorphization of God, a view shared by general opinion in ancient Greece which relied on an intervening power of the Demiurge for such an instrumental pragmatic relation to the world of matter. The world of “Forms” or “principles” explaining “what” we experience is paramount in the hylomorphic system which prioritises the question “Why?”. This latter question, Aristotle argues, satisfies a deep desire we possess to understand the “broad structure of reality”. We have no direct insight into divine thought, and Aristotle in his metaphysics characterises this tentatively, in terms of “thinking about thinking”, or “thinking about himself”. There is in this hylomorphic account, a systematic continuity in the relation of the powers of man and the power of the divine. God is pure form in a continuity that reaches down to a level of “prime matter”(which is pure potentiality). “Form “, in this context, is to be understood in terms of “Logos” or principle(arché) at a level which ,for us, is difficult to investigate and understand. Given this characterisation, there can be no objection to the kind of metaphorical account we find in Eliot’s poetry. “Immortality of the soul”, for example, can be characterised in terms of “timeless” but “timeless” does not mean “living forever”, which may be impossible to conceptualise, but rather “enduring in some form” over very long periods of time. “Intimations of immortality” can therefore be understood in such terms.

October 19, 2022October 19, 2022

Du Chatelet and Kant: abstract for conference “Dynamics and Reason”, in honour of the work of Du Chatelet.

Sortie du Théâtre du Chatelet by Auguste Louis Lepère (French, 1849–1918) is licensed under CC-CC0 1.0

The relationship between Du Chatelet and Voltaire reminds one of the Diotima-Socrates relation, where Diotima, according to the Symposium, gives Socrates a lecture on the relation of Logic to Eros. It is, however, the relation of the work of Du Chatelet to the work of Kant that is the theme of this conference, and it is the contention of this paper that Du Chatelet—being a follower of Wolff and Leibniz, was very much on Kant’s mind early on in his career when he was considering criticisms of his own form of rationalism.

We do find in Kant the two principles of general and special logic that Chatelet used in her form of rationalism, namely the principle of noncontradiction(PNC)and the principle of sufficient reason(PSR), but it must be pointed out that, the uses to which these principles were put in Kantian critical Philosophy(developed later in his career), were very different to the use we encounter in the work of Du Chatelet. We know that Kant, early on in his philosophical career, regarded himself as a rationalist, influenced by both the work of Leibniz and Wolff, but with his discovery of the importance of the role of sensibility in the production of many of our cognitive states, together with the encounter with Hume’s work which he described as “awakening him from his dogmatic slumbers”, the task of Kantian Philosophy grew in magnitude and included attempted syntheses of rationalist-empiricist conflicts in a manner that attempted to avoid many of the dogmatic theses of materialism and dualism.

Both Du Chatelet and Kant were influenced by Newton but Kant was probably more critical of those aspects of Newton that, in his view, attempted to say what cannot be said, e.g. that absolute time, in and of itself, flows. Kant argued, on the contrary, that both space and time are ways in which the sensible aspect of our minds organise our experience of the external world, and “internal” mental activity respectively. Kant certainly embraced the importance of mathematics in relation to one aspect of our relation to the external world, but he specifically claimed that Mathematics cannot be applied to thought and the activity of what he termed the “inner sense”.

My thesis is, that the underlying influence of the Kantian “Copernican Revolution” in relation to knowledge is that of Aristotelian Hylomorphic Philosophy, but it is an influence that is never directly acknowledged by Kant, This influence is , however, present in his whole approach to metaphysics and epistemology. This point is also evidenced in his terminology of “matter” and “form”, and in his reliance on many aspects of Aristotle’s “theory of change” and its complex account of 4 kinds of change, 3 principles of change, 4 causes(explanations) of change, 3 media of change(space, time and matter) and three groups of sciences(theoretical, practical, productive). This “Copernican Revolution” placed Kant’s work in the realm of the golden mean, between empiricism and rationalism, and between materialism and dualism, thus enabling him to give an account of reality as broadly-based as Aristotle’s, but somewhat deeper insofar as an account of the powers of mind were concerned.

For Kant, as was the case for both Aristotle and Plato, Mathematical reasoning was indispensable for the resolution of problems relating to the measurement of space and time insofar as they manifested themselves in our activities in the external world: problems that were essentially quantitative in nature. Its usefulness diminished in value, however, insofar as other categories of existence and understanding were concerned, e.g. the formulation of abstract knowledge-claims(e.g. All men(gender neutral use) are mortal) or the formulation of laws of thought and ethics(the PNC, PSR and the moral law). For example, one of the key aspects of Kantian Philosophical Psychology or Anthropology, is that in which we encounter the claim that the human form of life freely chooses(freely causes itself to do things) its beliefs and actions, and is thereby best understood as an “autonomous being” or an “autonomous form of life”. This leads us into the realm of practical science where the telos of action plays an important role in our explanations and justifications. This telos, then , has a complex relation to the other causes/explanations (aitia) of Aristotelian Philosophy.

We know the idea of God for both Wolff and Leibniz was an idea that belonged in the domain of theoretical reasoning, and we also know it was demoted by Kant in favour of the practical idea of freedom: an idea that demanded a metaphysical account very different to the kind of metaphysical accounts of Nature we find in the works of those dogmatic, scientific materialists who regard all journeys into the realm of the powers of the mind as “subjective”.

The Kantian revolution liberated Philosophical psychology/anthropology from its self-inflicted form of slavery, with the banner of the Enlightenment upon which is inscribed “Sapere Audi”(dare to use your reason). In this spirit, this combination of hylomorphic-critical philosophy, also gave rise to the possibility of a philosophically grounded concept of Human Rights which in its turn will hopefully provide all the Diotima’s, Du Chatelet’s and women philosophers of the future with a platform from which to speak and be heard.

October 16, 2022October 23, 2022

Absent minded Philosophy

Hoover Institution

Excellent discussion on the limitations of Darwinism, relying on an unexamined view of the role of mathematics in the description of life forms. There is no doubt that mathematics can quantify almost every material thing and its motion, but there is a doubt about its relevance to the kind of explanation of 1. life forms per se , 2. the explanation of the intelligence of life forms, and 3. explanations of consciousness that we find in Aristotle and Kant, who both saw the limitations of mathematics in this arena of Philosophy.

Psuche for Kant was categorically understood as a self-causing agent which, in the case of the human form of life, possessed powers of mind that fell into three domains, namely sensibility, understanding and reason. Animals possessed a form of nonlinguistic sensible “intelligence” with limited powers, and humans possessed an integrated battery of powers of sensibility, understanding and reason that enabled the formation of hylomorphic theory, Kantian theory, Wittgensteinian theory, that could never be reduced to any basic code that we find in information theory or genetic theory. This is not to deny that chains of amino acids in the end produce brains, and the organs of living systems, that constitute the different animal species. It is rather to insist that, what in the above discussion, was referred to as top-down accounts, give rise to a completely different kind of discussion, which would acknowledge the limitations of Darwin who certainly provided us with the law of natural selection that helps us explain the existence of the populations of animals we see around us today, and also helps to explain the fossils of extinct species we uncover. We recognise the American concern over the issue of Intelligent design, is still to some extent raging, without making any reference to the ancient Greek relation of what we call intelligence to “areté”(virtue, doing the right thing at the right time in the right way). Bringing areté into the discussion obviously also demands the introduction of other terms such as diké(justice), arché(principle) and epistemé(Knowledge). Aristotles theory rests upon an understanding of these terms, and might be an example of a non-theological top down theory that might have contributed to the discussion above when it ground to a halt upon being confronted with the demand for a more philosophical form of debate. The Philosophers view of Divinity, e.g. Aristotle’s, Kant’s and Wittgenstein’s accounts, make room for both Darwin and God without any need to turn these into dialectical opposites. All three Philosophers also agree in their rejection of both materialistic attempts to account for the issues of life, intelligence, and consciousness, as well as dualistic retreats into analytical psychology, phenomenology or theology. The Philosophers view of the divine does not share the view that everything that was created was, as one of the interviewees put it , “screwed up by man”. This is one theological view, but not one shared by Aristotle or Kant, for whom mans telos (his final cause), sufficed to characterise him as “good” in the formal essence-specifying sense, even if the manifestation of the consequences of his good nature would take a long time to materialise.

In short the ghosts of Aristotle hung in the air of the above discussion waiting for an opportunity to materialise which never came.

October 2, 2022October 8, 2022

Review of Ricoeur’s “Time and narrative” Vol 3: Conclusion Essay 21

Full disk view of the sun June 21, 2010 by NASA Goddard Photo and Video is licensed under CC-BY 2.0

We have noted that the key characters involved in Ricoeur’s plotting of the History of theories about Time are Augustine, Hegel, Husserl, and some analytical Philosophers. There are a number of “interpretations” of the work of Heidegger and Kant, but these are mostly made on the condition that the works are viewed through the prism of a particular view of consciousness and a particular view of language. Augustine, as we have seen, was preferred over Aristotle, and Hegel is preferred over Kant. Perhaps it is also a reasonable hypothesis to presume that Phenomenology and Hermeneutics are the preferred approaches to all aporetic questions raised in relation to Meaning, including those raised by the work of the later Wittgenstein.

Ricoeur has rejected Aristotelian and Kantian answers to the question “What is Time?”, and instead proposed a notion of time that is created by narrative, via a process of the “reconfiguration” of time. The Augustinian view of time played a central role in Ricoeur’s account, as does phenomenological investigation into the realm of our experience of time. Phenomenology shares the stage with a hermeneutical account of myth and the metaphorical function of language used in relation to time. This latter move, follows from a move Ricoeur makes in relation to his conviction that time is unrepresentable. This conclusion, in turn, appears to follow from the claim that there is a significant breach or philosophical incompatibility of the accounts of phenomenological time in comparison with the account of cosmological time that we find in both Aristotle and Kant.(P.244). Augustine’s rejection of cosmological accounts of time in favour of “the time of a mind that distends itself”(P.244), is an obvious reason for the above conclusion. Ricoeur, in the context of this discussion, incorrectly in our view, notes:

“time according to Kant immediately has all the features of cosmological time, inasmuch as it is the presupposition of every empirical change. Hence it is a structure of nature which includes the empirical egos of each and everyone of us”(P.244)

Ricoeur also notes that the “rational psychology” of Kant is incompatible with phenomenological investigations(the reduction and bracketing of “experience”). Presumably by “rational psychology”, Ricoeur means the method of charting the nature and relation of the powers of understanding and reason in organising our sensible relations to reality( the power of sensibility and its a priori intuitions of space and time). For Kant, the powers of sensibility, understanding and reason are integrated in general, but also particularly in relation to the complex activity of the creation and appreciation of a narrative. Also, as we pointed out in a previous essay of this review, the “before and after” structure of our understanding of narratives(fictional and historical) are the same as the “before and after” structure of our perception of change in the physical world(a boat sailing downstream). In the case of the radiator that warms the room and the boat sailing downstream, it would not make sense in a narrative to claim that the room warmed the radiator or the boat was further upstream as a consequence of its journey downstream. Time, causality, the principle of noncontradiction and the principle of sufficient reason, all hang together in these two constellations of change, thus illustrating the way in which the powers of sensibility, categories of understanding and principles of reason are integrated in the mind-as-a-whole.

Ricoeur refers to the mimetic character of the narrative in relation to his proposal of the invention of a “third form” of time”, which apparently results from the “fracture” of what could he called “world-time”. This third form of time, is dialectically arrived at via the interweaving of the reconfigurations we encounter in fictional and historical narratives powered by an imagination that seems to give sensibility greater influence in our experience(at the expense of the intellectual powers we rational animals possess).

Ricoeur points out that the question of “Who one is”, requires a story in response, and this story, in turn, presupposes an enduring entity, persisting through a process of change. This is an interesting shift of attention from the Aristotelian/Kantian categorical question “What is a human being?” The shift, it must be noted, is a shift from the universality of the conceptual realm to the existence of individuals in the realm of the particular. The question “Who?” must be answered by referring to a particular individual. This shift from the logical realm of general universal truth to the realm of particular truth is a shift from essence-specifying truths, to the particular issue of the identity of a particular human being. This shift is a relatively modern affair, possibly instituted by the reflections of John Locke, who argued that the powers of consciousness and memory, are what account for why an individual believes they remain the same individual over time. There is, of course, no doubt that at least insofar as fictional narrative is concerned, the identity of the individual over the time and event-span of the narrative, defines that identity completely, and gives a sufficient answer to the question “Who is this(character)?” If we are dealing with a tragic narrative, the characters irrationality and lack of understanding of what is happening around him, may well define him/her as a tragic figure, but it is nevertheless the case that the categories of understanding and principles of reason form the categorical reference-grid for judgements about this character’s character.

Ricoeur discusses the psychoanalytic process and its striving for the good of a cure in relation to the question “Who am I?”. The process of “working through” will certainly involve firstly, the memory and the imagination, and secondly, the attempt in the working-through process to insure that each of these powers integrate more fully into the functioning of the mind-as-a-whole. Involved in this process, may be an attempt to transform a tragic traumatic experience created by fight-flight functions of the more primitive nervous-systems of the brain into normal memories devoid of affect and fantasy.

Ricoeur discusses the identity of the Jewish people and their traumas in fight-flight context, but fails to acknowledge the role of ethical justice in their evolving History. Most of the narrative of the Bible relating to the Jewish people, refers to the theme of ethical justice rather than the identity of the Jewish race in exile, searching for the promised land. Ricoeur does however admit the following:

“So narrative identity is not equivalent to true self-constancy, except through this decisive moment, which makes ethical responsibility the highest fact in self-constancy.”(P.249)

Moses’ rejection of the images of animal gods, marked an iconoclastic moment of the journey of the Jews toward the promised land, and this viewed in one way, may suggest the advent or coming of another particular prophet with a closer relation to God: with an agenda relating not to a promised land, but a better way of life (not just for a particular people but for all mankind(the brotherhood of man)). This could only be achieved by a reliance on religious principles that condensed down into two commandments, Love God above all, and Love thy Neighbour. The Old and the New Testament then, marked an advance in religious thinking toward the Greek ideal of eudaimonia(the good spirited flourishing life) whilst retaining the ideal of ethical justice(areté). The message of the new testament is, of course, the subject matter for hermeneutic attempts to interpret the new testament texts These texts, however, are not ambiguous myths but more like historical documents created ,for example, by the writings of the apostles. There can be no created plot or refiguring of time in accordance with such a plot. References to the “son of God” and various “miracles” may be the residue of the mythical tradition of story-telling using the device of “Metaphor”. Ricoeur believes, paradoxically:

“Still it belongs to the reader, now an agent, an initiator of action, to choose among the multiple proposals of ethical justice brought forth by reading.”(P.249)

The background to this is, of course, the Augustinian arguments for the fragmentation of time into the presence of the past, the presence of the present and the presence of the future, conceived of as “present”, and the consequent phenomenological attempt to glue the parts together via a “threefold present”(P.250). Kant, we know, refused to countenance such a fragmentation of the sensible function of Time by claiming that:

“Different times are but parts of one and the same time”(A31, B47)

The protentions and retentions attached to a “living present” are, of course, phenomenological attempts to unite the Augustinian fragments under the guise of a “phenomenological reduction” or “phenomenological bracketing”, attempts which do not engage with Heideggers perspective of “Being-as-a-whole”. “Being-as-a-whole” refers, in turn, to both Care, and a “being-towards-death”, which Heidegger emphasised as part of his attempt to move away from the present as the primary temporal orientation of Dasein. For Heidegger, the future was the primary concern of the human being. The above Husserlian phenomenological aspects also fail to engage with the “infinity of time” and thus make possible myths and narratives that assume mythical absolute beginnings (creation myths)and mythical absolute ends(the Hegelian Absolute).

The narrative identity of a person or a character could never answer the Kantian anthropological question “What is a human being?”, in accordance with the principle of sufficient reason and/or the categories of understanding. This question is not in search of particular truths, but rather essence-specifying definitions or characterisations. We know the Aristotelian answer to this question is “rational animal capable of discourse”, and we also know that memory, for example, is a necessary condition of the unity of apperception of Kant’s account–a unity characterised in terms of “I think” rather than “I am conscious”. The thinking process conceived of in this case, unites representations in a manifold. The “I think”, for Kant, unites the sensible and intellectual aspects of our minds: apriori intuitions and categories of the concepts formed by our understanding are related in truth-making judgements or value-judgements(judgements guided by the principle or form of “The Good”). These judgements, in turn, can be combined to form arguments for knowledge-claims or value-claims, in accordance with the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. In the case of value-judgements, we also encounter the establishment of limits for both understanding and reason which cannot, it is claimed, fathom the depths of the issue of the origin of evil. A similar limit appears also to apply to the conception of the summum bonum, and the conceiving of the idea of the “holy will”. These Kantian limits of representational thinking are also encountered at the other end of the spectrum of the mind, namely the representations connected with space, time and matter. These limits follow from the fact that we are finite beings-in-the-world unable to “think” the infinite in accordance with the principles of reason. Being finite beings, we are therefore placed “in” space and “in” time as witnesses of motion and change, and this finitude explains or justifies the fact that we must then conceive of beginnings and ends in terms of “principles” or laws. We are not Gods, and this, for Aristotle, explained why we needed to live in communities “with” each other in the space of hope and lamentation, sharing only one aspect of God’s thinking, namely, rationality. Perhaps it is in discourse or language that we can best realise our potentiality for rational thinking.

Ecclesiastes claims that there is a time for every purpose under heaven. What is being talked about are rational animals capable of discourse. In relation to this discussion, the later Wittgenstein also pointed to certain limits of the human conception of time when he claimed that it does not make sense to say that it is 5 o clock on the sun. Now whilst there may be some truth to the claim that the limits of my language are the limits of my world, this does not warrant jettisoning the intellectual powers of reasoning and understanding that operate in relation to the conditions of human representations of space and time. It is, Kant argues, substance determined by the “principle” of the permanent that constitutes what he refers to as “time in general”. Kant would certainly have rejected any attempts to reduce the above categorical forms of judgement to the protentions and retentions of an internal time-consciousness. The self-constitution of Consciousness, for Kant, would have been explained in terms of the unity of apperception and its role in human thinking.

Ricoeur raises the question of how narrative can refigure Time, if time itself is unrepresentable. The ideas of plot, character, and event are used for fictional reconfigurations, and ideas of quasi-plot, quasi-character, and quasi-event are used for historical reconfigurations of time. These types of reconfiguration are then used by Ricoeur to “explain” or justify” how this mysterious process of “reconfiguration” occurs.

The whole adventure through these three volumes ends with the suggestion that it is the individual’s and community’s search for narrative identity which constitutes the historical form of consciousness: a form of consciousness in which the imagination is the most significant power of the mind and provides us with the most promising avenue of justifying any answer to the aporetic question “What is time?”

September 29, 2022October 8, 2022

Review of Ricoeur’s “Time and Narrative” Vol 3: Essay 20 Hermeneutics of Historical Consciousness.

lighted buildings nighttime — Photo by jimmy teoh on Pexels.com

Ricoeur makes an explicit commitment to Action in this chapter, although it is unclear whether the idea of insufficiency or incompleteness will be jettisoned in the dialectic of the past and the future that is synthesised in this presence of action. He claims:

“Even the idea of tradition– which already includes a genuine tension between the perspective of the past and that of the present and thereby increases temporal distance at the same time that it crosses it—does not give rise to thought….unless it is by way of the intentionality of a history to be made that refers back to it.”(P.207)

This claim that the idea of tradition does not give rise to thought, unless it is via the intentionality of history, is indeed a puzzling one. Surely historical thought is sufficiently related to the past in virtue an unproblematic relation of the past to the present manifested in the powers of memory, understanding and reason? If the principle of sufficient reason is applicable in this case, then historical judgements relating to tradition must give rise to forms of thought that remember, understand and reason.

Of course, if one, like Hegel, questions the sufficiency of human memory, understanding and reason, then the historical relation between the present and the past will be ruptured, and answers to questions relating to sufficient reasons for historical judgments and historical deeds will, indeed become problematic. For Ricoeur, however, it is evident that the application of the categories of understanding and the principles of reason contribute to unnecessary abstraction about the past. This position can be supported by Ricoeur’s view of “symbolic” language which, because of its structure of “double meaning”, requires a complex process of “interpretation” before we can be clear about this use of language. Ricoeur’s claim in the context of this discussion, is that it is “symbols” that give rise to thought. Texts which contain “symbols” i.e. can only be sufficiently understood if a hermeneutical “method” is used to “reveal” the latent meaning of the symbols. Rather than appeal to memory, Ricoeur focuses upon insufficiency and “forgetfulness” in relation to the interplay of significations, and he claims that we need also to understand the interplay between our expectations of the future and our interpretations of the past(P.208), whilst simultaneously rejecting the tendency to think in abstractions about the past. Ricoeur then makes a phenomenological/hermeneutic attempt to combat the above form of forgetfulness via a discussion of Reinhart Kosellecks distinction between the “categories” of a “space of experience” and a “horizon of expectation”. The “category” of the past all but disappears in this discussion which largely concentrates upon dialectic reasoning relating to the present and the future. Ricoeur raises the question:

“why speak of a space of experience rather than the persistence of the past in the present…?”(P.208)

He fails, however, to provide us with an answer that maintains the integrity either of tradition or our historical knowledge relating to tradition. Ricouer elaborates upon the above position by maintaining:

“Whether it be a question of private experience or of experience transmitted by prior generations or current institutions, it is always a question of something foreign being overcome.”(P.208)

Even the above conception of “expectation” is insufficient or incomplete because:

“expectation cannot be derived from experience”(P.208)

Aristotle, Kant and the later Wittgenstein would find the above idea of insufficiency or incompleteness in relation to judgements about the past or the future, incomprehensible. Wittgenstein, for example, in his “Philosophical Investigations” discusses the important scientific idea of “the uniformity of nature” and has the following reflections to contribute:

“472. The character of the belief in the uniformity of nature can perhaps be seen most clearly in the case in which we fear what we expect. Nothing could induce me to put my hand into a flame—although after all it is only in the past that I have burnt myself.

473.The belief that the fire will burn me is of the same kind as the fear that it will burn me.

474.I shall get burnt if I put my hand in the fire:that is certainty. That is to say : here we see the meaning of certainty(What it amounts to not the meaning of the word “certainty”)”

Wittgesteins account focuses upon the central idea of action, juxtaposed to an idea of “meaning” not confined to the realm of language. In the above, he finds no need for any kind of phenomenological/hermeneutic investigation into the thought involved in the belief “that the fire will burn me”. Present in the background of his reflections is an acknowledgement of the importance of the categories of understanding and the principles of reason(noncontradiction, sufficient reason). Past previous experience and our statements about the past are, he argues, sufficient “grounds” for the expectation that the fire will burn me, and the category of causality is assumed in such an argument. Skepticism about the temporal “categories” of the past and the future, would also be anathema to all forms of hylomorphic and critical investigation, as would skepticism about the integrity of tradition.

The problem of whether we can defend a position claiming that civilisation is “progressing”, is, of course, a different and more complex matter, requiring the disentangling of many “threads” of evidence and argument for and against the thesis. Such evidence would have to include arguments for the truth of idealistic judgements, and perhaps also evidence for the Aristotelian claim that good prevails over evil over a longer period of time(millennia). The idea of tradition, when considered in a context of explanation/justification is also, then, something that needs evaluation over such long time periods: “centuries” may be the currency of historians, but such a limited time period is not the currency of Philosophers(cf. the Kantian claim that the kingdom of ends lies one hundred thousand years in the future). The philosophical idea of “the uniformity of tradition” will not relate merely to events such as believing we will be burned by the fire if we insert our hand, but also extend to the certainty we attach to the practical ideals of justice, freedom, and democracy. The journey toward a Greek telos of eudaimonia(good spirited flourishing life), or the journey toward the kingdom of ends does, admittedly, in some sense suggest the idea of “insufficiency” insofar as the past and the present are concerned, especially when compared with an ideal future. In fact it is this form of insufficiency that justifies the conviction we have in the imperative ought form of judgement, e.g. “We ought to keep promises”, which in turn explains partly our commitment to “ought forms of argumentation”, that are part of our justification of a particular action of keeping a promise. Systematically, doing what one ought to do, on both Aristotelian and Kantian accounts, will have good consequences for ones life, and there is no objection to anthropomorphising the polis and saying something similar for the “actions” of government(passing and implementing laws etc).Kant, in the context of this discussion, referred in Socratic fashion to the combination of the good-in-itself with good consequences as the “summum bonum”(the highest good).

The “progress” of science is for many, the measure of the progress of our civilisation, but (modern)science is not what used to be, (namely, the bearer of epistemé), given its current obsession with techné(technology). For more traditional philosophers, e.g. Wittgenstein, Culture and Science are different routes to the future. Wittgenstein claims in Culture and Value:

“(We are involved here with the Kantian solution to the problem of Philosophy)”( Blackwell, Oxford, 1998, trans Winch P, P.13e)

Wittgenstein’s approach, however, differs from that of Kant, in that he turns to the task of clarifying the use of our language for his solutions to the problems of Philosophy. He notes the absence of concern with tragedy in our Contemporary Cultures, and relates this fact to the expression “Nothing happens!” In the context of this discussion, he also notes the similarity of the form of philosophical investigations with the form of aesthetic investigations(P29e). The Bible, for Wittgenstein, is a work in which the spirit of value is expressed, not in terms of epistemological concerns with the truth, but rather in terms of the Will, i.e in terms of a form of life in which we “live” an interpretation of the value of life and the world(P.73e). Freud, a fellow Viennese Kantian, is very much on Wittgenstein’s mind, in this work “Culture and Value”. Both “philosophers” express a sense of discontentment with modern life in our modern civilisations that it is difficult to lightly dismiss. Wittgenstein. like Freud, believes in the important role of Instinct in our cultural life and he argues that even our philosophical scruples have their roots in instinct(P.83e). The difference between these thinkers, however, is that in contrast to Wittgenstein, Freud is not a religious-believer. Wittgenstein, indeed, proclaimed on one occasion that he views the world religiously, and he sometimes even speculates positively on the relation of Christianity and Truth(89e). The discontent with civilisation we encounter in Wittgenstein’s reflections, however, may be deeper than that which we encounter in Freud but we should not underestimate the claim by both men to be influenced by Kant. There is nothing, that is, to prevent us from viewing both thinkers as elaborating upon the thought of both Aristotle and Kant. Wittgenstein certainly created a “logical space” for the reemergence of hylomorphic and critical philosophy, There is no room for the dialectical logic of Hegel or Nietzsche in this traditional landscape from the past.

Ricoeur speaks of a “new time” in the context of evaluating the arguments for “progress” in the development of our civilisations, but he is uncertain about the realisation of any “better future”, preferring to fixate upon the crises of the past and the present:

“What happens is always something other than we expected.” P.213

He connects this thought to the following claim:

“it is no longer certain that freedom, in the sense of an establishment of a civil society and a state of law, is the only hope, or major expectation of a great part of humanity.”(P.213)

This looks initially like an empirical observation related to the number of discontents one experiences in everyday life, and perhaps disguises the extent to which these discontents, appearances notwithstanding, may yet believe that a “better future” is possible. Ricoeur suggests that the “dream” of a “reconciled humanity” may be a “purely utopian expectation” and fears that the consequences of such a state of affairs is humanity despairing of all action(P.215). In spite of these anti-Kantian speculations, Ricoeur returns to the Kantian vision of:

“a universal civil society administered in accord with right”(P.216)

and hastens to point out that “at present” this has not been achieved, and further suggests that we turn to the past and the role of tradition for an explanation of such a sad state of affairs. Ricoeur also discusses Gadamer’s claim that the connection between history and knowledge must be discarded in attempts to interpret the significance of history. Such a move, of course, casts doubt upon any understanding of history based on knowledge. It also casts doubt upon the tribunal of reason that works on the “principle of sufficient reason”. Having earlier dismissed the role of correct memory in the understanding of History, there then appears to be little alternative but to deny any form of universality to the dialectical results of hermeneutic/phenomenological investigations. Ricoeur wishes to define the present solely in terms of acting and suffering, and he invokes Merleau-Ponty’s(MP) argument against the Cartesian “I think therefore I am”. MP, we know wishes to maintain that the lived body lives in a present in which “I can” becomes a more important power than that of thought. Ricoeur also introduces Danto’s analytical/empirical view of action/agency, and Austin’s view of speech-acts into the discussion, in order to justify his focus on the present temporal dimension, and he also attempts to tie “initiatives” such as making a promise to the lived through present and the past . With this form of account, we are indeed back to that point where Augustine defined the past as that which is no longer present and the future– as that present which is yet to come. The image of the present then becomes:

“thick with the immanence of the near future and the record of a just-passed past”(P.233)

Now whilst it is undoubtedly true that events actualise in the present, it is unclear whether we can claim that the present itself is actualised, simply because it is merely a potential “now”. However “thick” this present is conceived to be, it would actually be better to conceive of it in terms of a point-instant, even if this too might mathematically schematise our relation to this dimension of time unnecessarily. Ricoeur then admits that the individual act of promising, if it is to make any sense, must be preceded by a rule or law to the effect of “Promises ought to be kept”. This move is, however confounded by his conceiving of the individual act and the collective law as “in opposition”. The latter he claims is a social contract which occurs in:

“the cosmo-political dimension of the public space”(P.235)

Nietzsche is also invoked and praised for breaking with the traditional treatment of the problem of knowledge in his reflections upon Time. Nietzsche suggests in this context that we develop the capacity to “live unhistorically” and “forget” our “perverse relation to the past”(P.236). History, he argues, is more a matter of life or death than an abstract problem of knowledge, and he suggests that the tribunals of knowledge “close off the life of humanity”(P.237) Ricoeur also embraces the Nietzschean view of justice which maintains that when justice is regarded as the “Last Judgement” that condemns and punishes, it is occurring independently of the “power of judgement”. It is, Ricoeur adds, only when judgement is made from the viewpoint of the “highest strength of the present” that we are able to “refigure time” and become a master of our time rather than a slave to it. Ricoeur argues further that:

“the historical present is , in each era, the final term of a completed history which itself completes and ends history.”(.231)

Given the manifest contempt modern man has for the so called “achievements of the present, this is indeed a curious position to defend, although it is admitted at the end of the chapter that it is necessary to use an iconoclastic approach to tradition and history if one is to engage in the task of “refiguring time”. Memory is marginalised along with the categories of the understanding and the principles of reason in favour of a mysterious form of “forgetfulness” and its role in “refiguring time”.

September 25, 2022October 9, 2022

Review of Ricoeur’s “Time and Narrative” Vol 3 : Essay 19 The Spirit of the Times and World History

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Marx’s criticism of Hegel amounts to a criticism of both idealism and the role of abstract reason in world history. Both Marx and Hegel are committed to dialectical logic, in which a synthesis “emerges” from the opposition of a thesis and an antithesis. For Marx, however, economic realities such as the concrete ownership and operation of the “means of production”, are far more important that the abstract ideas of justice and freedom that have come down to us via the Greeks and the Enlightenment. Hegel, as we know, claimed that he was turning Kantian Philosophy on its head, and Marx in his turn said the same about Hegelian Phenomenology. Some hoped in vain that the double inversion would return us to the status quo of the Enlightenment, but the “modern spirit” of this double inversion left us in a limbo of ambiguity that in its turn was explored by later phenomenologists. With Marx, we are invited to consider an empirical sociological theory that does not engage with Aristotelian or Kantian categories or principles. We find little reference, for example, to Aristotle’s prediction that it would be the political force of the middle class that would create future political stability. Marx eschewed all forms of abstraction of the kind we find in Aristotle and Kant, in favour of a pragmatic realism based on concrete actions and processes.

Ricoeur complains that the downfall of Hegelian Philosophy came suddenly like an earthquake, but he neglects to observe that a Kantian critical Philosophy experienced a very similar fate at the hands of Hegelian Phenomenology. The spirit of these times was obviously one in which “change” was occurring at ever increasing rates. One “inversion”, however, is worth noting, and that is the reversal involved in Hegel’s abandonment of the principle of noncontradiction (so important in Kantian Logic), for the principle of contradiction which negated any thesis into an antithesis. This negation was not the negation of a proposition in a judgement, but rather the negation of a concept which would remain “incomplete” until the final synthesis occurred when the absolute actualised itself in world-history. Spirit was an important part of this actualisation or transformational process, in which the “cunning of reason” mobilises concrete passions in a process that is moving toward a kind of telos. Negation, then, becomes the key moment of dialectical reasoning, which alone is necessary in an account of the “progress” of world-history. Ricoeur points out that, for Hegel:

“The history of the world, therefore is, in essence “the expression of spirit in time just as nature is the expression of idea in space.”(P.200)

Time, on this kind of phenomenological account, possesses the property of Negation, and the Philosophy of History becomes subservient to the Spirit of History, because Philosophy, Hegel argues, always arrives on the scene too late after the actualisation of Spirit. The past, for Hegel, and for phenomenology, is also defined by Negation–it is not the present. Yet the spiritual priority of the temporal dimension of the present over the dimensions of the past and the future introduces an idea of “incompleteness” or insufficiency into these other dimensions, which then requires negation as part of their essence-specifying definitions. We ought to recall Heidegger’s reservations over prioritising the present. The present for him was defined in terms of what was ready-to hand, and what various objects in the environment could be used for ,in what he called a network of instrumentalities. What was merely present-at-hand for an observing form of consciousness was problematic for Heidegger. Acting-in-order-to do something, was his major emphasis. Defining the past in terms of not being present marginalises the power of memory to correctly recall the past in a truth-making synthesis and thereby characterises the records of our memory, namely historical texts as in some way insufficient or incomplete. It is the present that bears the burden of the real in such a situation, and this insufficiency or incompleteness is then projected onto the relation these dimensions have to reality. Hegel, in his appeal to the importance of negation, speaks of the Concept rather than the Judgement. Only the Concept of the Absolute, he argues, escapes the assignment of the specification of insufficiency or incompleteness. The Absolute, it seems is the result of a supreme “plot” of History that can not be appreciated by our human forms of consciousness. Ricoeur characterises this moment of actualisation of the Absolute in the following terms:

“historical consciousness’s understanding of itself, its self-understanding.”(P.206)

He does not, however, see any difficulty in the ambiguity of the ontological status of this understanding, namely that it is impossible to say whether the above event was something we did, or rather something that happened to us. For Aristotle, Kant and Wittgenstein, this form of ambiguity, effaces a key ontological distinction and principle in the field of action, and risks conflating the practical and the theoretical aspects of our existence. This ontological distinction is also a key element in the categorical understanding of the reality of action, as conceived in the arenas of Philosophy of Philosophical Psychology, Ethics, and Politics. The appeal to consciousness, in this context, is, of course, also problematic, given its primarily sensible nature. Ricoeur does, however, claim to leave Hegel behind in his theorising but the “trace” of Hegelian phenomenology never seems far away and haunts much of his reasoning when he engages in the marginalisation of memory, understanding and reason.

September 23, 2022October 9, 2022

Review of Ricoeur’s “Time and Narrative” Vol 3: Essay 18 History and Fiction

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We use calendars and clocks for organising the future, but also for remembering, understanding, and reasoning about the past. Both “instruments” use numerical measurements to measure time in terms of before and after. Clocks help us to measure intervals of time, and help us to determine the beginning, duration, and end of the work day, building upon instincts and vicissitudes of instincts. A major emphasis of this form of organisation is on, beginning at the same time of the day, ending at the same time of the day, and working the same number of hours every day. This is, in accordance with Aristotelian principles of change, which specify that something must remain the same throughout the change. The calendar also measures beginnings, durations, and ends, but here the emphasis is upon differentiating days and larger units of time from each other, e.g. the first world war from the second world war. The clock and the calendar, then, form the time framework that helps to organise what Wittgenstein referred to as the “hurly-burly” of community activities, but it is the calendar that is of central importance for the concern of the community with History and the remembering of important events. Ricoeur acknowledges the differences between the “telos” of the clock and the calendar:

“Despite all the differences that can be found between the clock and the calendar, however, reading the calendar is also an interpretation of signs comparable to reading a sundial or a clock”(P.183)

This reference to “reading” and “interpretation” for an activity of the understanding, may be problematic especially considering that there is no difficulty for anyone to answer the questions “What is the time?” or “What is the date?” We do, of course have to look at the clock or the calendar, but the recognition of the time or the date, is an immediate effect, very similar to immediately understanding the meaning of a word. We immediately understand what we see, and do not have to see what we see “as” something using the power of imagination. For Ricoeur, however, the date of an event involves identifying an actual present with a particular unit of time, e.g., a day. Memories, on this view become dated events on a time continuum. The notion of a “trace” is again invoked and this trace is “interpreted” using the power of the imagination. The power of memory is thus marginalised, and this is unfortunate given its central importance in our understanding of the world. Wittgenstein points to a major difference between memory and imagination by claiming that the former can be correct or faulty, whereas in the case of the imagination there is no question of its correctness or faultiness, or indeed, any question of a cognitive relation to the external world. Wittgenstein, in the context of this discussion, speaks about the difference between remembering the time of departure of a train and the conjuring up of an image of a train time-table:

“If the mental image of the time-table could not itself be tested for correctness, how could it confirm the correctness of the first memory?”(P.265)

For Wittgenstein, the lack of relation of the image to the external world, indicates a fundamental incompleteness, if one wishes to regard the image as having “cognitive” content, and this may be why a process of “interpretation” is suggested. Memory can be faulty, but this does not testify to a fundamental incompleteness or a need to “interpret” its signs. The Historian uses the language game of reporting in his various activities, which, of course, presupposes the correct operation of “remembering”, an operation he trusts:

“509. I really want to say that a language-game is only possible if one trusts something.”(On Certainty, Wittgenstein, Oxford, Blackwell, 1969)

A dog, for Wittgenstein, does not have the mental capacity to expect his master to come home for Christmas. Indeed, a close examination of the dogs behaviour, reveals an attachment to signals in the immediate environment and the present moment . These signals form the basis for a recognition of things to come, which can initiate a limited form of expectant behaviour. This limited form of expectation, tied to a primitive memory function of “recognition”, confines the canine form of life to the present. It should also be observed, that forms of life which do not possess a language, are also limited in their mental and cognitive powers. This position can be complemented with a Heideggerian account of Dasein, which maintains that the primary temporal relation of our form of Being-in-the-world is an orientation toward the future. Thinking about the future, for a being possessed of a powerful memory, and a complex language, obviously also makes the measurement of time by clocks and calendars possible. It also enables political and ethical discussions in the agora, and the creation, reading and understanding of historical and fictional texts.

There are, Wittgenstein argues, general facts of nature which partly determine our being-in-the-world, e.g. cosmic facts such as the relations of hot, cold, wet and dry that are necessary for the creation and sustaining of life on a planet. These general facts of nature also include psychological potentialities which arise from the battery of integrated sensible and mental powers that characterise human forms of life. This kind of account obviously has affinities with both Aristotelian Hylomorphism and Kantian Critical Philosophy. Memory is a key power in the context of this discussion: not memory in its most primitive form of recognition, but rather memory as characterised by the kind of complex accounts we find in Freud and Wittgenstein. For Freud, to take an example, memory is a complex vicissitude of instinct that provides human forms of life with a relation to the external world and the past that can be expressed correctly in language in the form of reports. The language-game of reporting, Wittgenstein claims is fundamentally tied to the Truth:

“The truth of my statements is the test of my understanding of these statements”(On Certainty, 80)

Wittgenstein also implies that memory is similarly related to the truth, and he further claims that, whilst individual/particular memories play a role in relating me to my past, general knowledge of a number of empirical propositions such as, “The earth has existed for a long time”, also play an important role in our historical understanding of our world. If asked how such general knowledge is possible Wittgenstein claims that it is :

“The inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false”(OC 94)

Wittgenstein also speaks of the language-game of judging, and claims that judgements and beliefs form a system, which mutually support one another. Children are then inducted into this form of life, piecemeal, over a long period of time. This induction process requires trust in the adult which then is transferred to the system of judgments and knowledge the adult is using. The adult acts on the truth of his knowledge and judgment, and this is a further confirmation of the validity of the system for the child. Action is an important justification:

“Giving grounds, however, justifying the evidence, comes to an end, but the end is not certain propositions striking us immediately as true, i.e. it is not a kind of seeing on our part:it is our acting which lies at the bottom of the language-game(OC 264)

The Historian, too, believes in a number of empirical propositions and makes historical judgments which are correct, on the basis of the presence of witnesses and documentation. The occurrence of events are corroborated in the acts of testimony or documentation that are part of the procedure which results in the creation of historical texts. Even the production of these texts is an instance of the historian acting on the basis of his system of knowledge and judgements. If the text created is then used in schools:

“The schoolboy believes his teacher and his schoolbooks.”(OC 263)

These remarks on Memory and Judgement do not fit comfortably with the account that we are given of these elements by Ricoeur, who speaks of incomplete texts, suspicious readers, and the need for hermeneutic phenomenological “interpretations” that explain and justify in terms of the hypotheticals of “the imagination” and “seeng-as”. The integrity of Tradition and custom is definitely preserved in Aristotelian Hylomorphic and Kantian critical accounts of History and Fiction, Memory and Judgement, but they simply cannot survive intact in the climate of incompleteness and suspicion outlined above. In Aristotle, Kant, and Wittgenstein there are propositions that appear to be “empirical” but in fact function “normatively”, as principles or rules embedded in a language-system, which in turn is embedded both in the hurly-burly of community activity over millennia, and forms of life determined by very general facts of nature. The whole depends upon an integrated system of sensible, linguistic, and intellectual powers. Wittgenstein´s specific contribution to this discussion, is connected to his methodology of grammatical investigations in which logic and rationality cannot be “described”, but rather “shows itself” in the practice of language. Language-games, according to Wittgenstein, are not rational in themselves but “there–like our life”(OC 559). If someone, for example, denied that the earth has existed for a very long time, then, and only ,then would we, Wittgenstein claimed, resort to “persuasion” and rhetoric to convince them of the truth.

It is difficult to know exactly what Ricoeur means when he refers to the role of historical imagination in the explanation /justification of historical judgements. Ricoeur’s argument seems to run in the opposite direction to the account given by Wittgenstein. He claims, for example that:

“The past is what I would have seen, what I would have witnessed if I had been there” (Ricoeur “Time and Narrative”, (P.185)

The argument is cast in terms of the priority of the present, and the activity of observation(seeing). We also, it is implied, use imagination in fictional contexts when we, for example, see events as tragic, comic etc. This emphasis upon the priority of the presence of something that can be observed or seen, is also used to characterise fiction in terms of the illusion or hallucination of presence(P.186) Fictional narration, Ricoeur argues, reports something “as if” it were in the past. The Aristotelian criterion of fiction being an imitation of reality, and history being a true report about the past, is lost in this discussion. Imitation, of course, does permit an exercise of the power of imagination on the part of the author and reader. This power is then, in the normal case, integrated with the understanding, and judgements are produced that “exemplify” universal and necessary aspects of our response to the “form of finality” of the objects (expressed by aesthetic ideas) we are appreciating. In fictional narratives the aesthetic issues and principles used, are more directly related to practical rather than theoretical reason. These ideas in a different form are also the concern of the Historian—e.g. freedom and justice–but the concern is not expressed in reports about important events(e.g. a war), but rather in judgements about those reports(the terrible consequences of a war).

The suggestion by Ricoeur that History and Fiction can be interwoven is, then, a fruitful suggestion, but only if we focus on those aesthetic ideas and principles that relate to ideas of practical reason, and only if we focus upon the powers of memory ,understanding and reason, and refuse to prioritise the sensible powers of perception and imagination. There is also common ground in what both Ricoeur and Wittgenstein call a “vision of the world”, which involves a vision of a future world: a vision that perhaps builds upon a mutual belief that man is not as rational as he ought to be, and perhaps also more violent than he ought to be. This reference to a better future may also involve moments of catharsis for both the Historian and the fictional author.

September 20, 2022October 9, 2022

Review of Ricoeur’s “Time and Narrative” Vol 3: Essay 17 The Author, the Reader, and the Text.

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Ricoeur, in this chapter, elaborates upon earlier dialectical transactional analyses relating to the reader and the authors relative contribution to the format of the fictional text. His analysis begins with a discussion that reminds one of old medieval debates over the unreality of the characters in a fictional work, and the comparison made here is to the reality content of historical narratives. Aristotle reminded us that all forms of art are “imitations” of reality, but they are nevertheless “real” imitations aiming at the real objective of “The Good”. The characters of fictional narrative might not be located in the real space-time continuum of the real physical world, but they are purposeful teleological creations, and the extent to which we are able to fully understand their point or telos is related to how successful the author is in imitating the human form of life and its world. Both the power of understanding and judgement, in this context, relates to the logical structure of aesthetic understanding and judgements that occur in the process of writing/reading/appreciating/criticising the text. Two of the primary judgements of importance are the judgement ,”This is beautiful!” and “This is sublime!”. These are universal and logical judgements related to the “form” or “principles” and the aesthetic ideas of the text, and we rely on Aristotelian Hylomorphic Philosophy and Kantian critical Philosophy for the explanation/justification of these judgements. In the cognitive process, which aims at understanding the text we are reading, there may well also occur a play of emotions such as pity and fear(if we are dealing with a tragedy) for the fate of the major characters of the work, and these emotions will be connected to powers of perception and imagination. In the end, however, this non-cognitive part of the process will also be regulated by our powers of understanding and reason. To prioritise the imagination at the expense of the understanding, in the context of such judgements, risks jeopardising the universal and necessary aspect of these judgements, which belong in the context of explanation/justification. Wittgenstein contributed to the philosophical understanding of the power of the imagination in the following way:

“Images tell us nothing either right or wrong about the external world.”(Zettel, 109e)

622. One would like to say:The imaged is in a different space from the heard sound. Hearing is connected to listening: forming an image of a sound is not. That is why the heard sound is in a different space from the imagined sound.”(Zettel, 109e)

So, according to this reasoning, the reader, in spite of the fact that the initial input from the text is visual, cognitively responds not to the visual data, but to the sound(and not the image of the sound). In the context of this discussion, it would be misleading to use the term, as some literary critics of poetry have, of the “auditory imagination”. The space of the auditory, is a space of understanding and reason, and not one of perception and imagination. Tied up with the above quote by Wittgenstein, is a grammatical point about the formation of images, namely that forming images is driven by the will and intention, and therefore cannot surprise us in the way that hearing something or listening for something can.

The hearing process is connected to a readiness on the part of the reader to learn what the author intends the reader to learn. All activity aims at the Good, Aristotle argues, and the Good involved in tragic texts will inevitably involve the greek ideas of areté(doing the right thing at the right time in the right way) and diké(justice, getting what one deserves). These will be the formal and final causes respectively involved in the appreciation of the text. The Kantian moral law is, we have argued in previous essays, merely a formalised reformulation of the Greek idea of the Good. This reformulation takes two forms:

1, So act that the maxim of your action can be willed to become a universal law

2. Treat everyone(including oneself) as ends-in-themselves and not merely instrumentally as means to some further end.

Freedom is very much involved in the above reformulations, and allows an ethical foundation for the concept of human rights we encounter in the political/legal domain. Maxims are principles regulating our action, and one such principle is that of happiness(which Kant called the principle of self love in disguise). The ego-centred nature of the principle of happiness, however, cannot be universalised and therefore cannot be connected to moral necessities and duties, because treating everyone as a means to ones own happiness is a principle destined to lead to conflict, if everyone embraces it. Conflict infringes upon everyones freedom. Part of the problem with instrumental forms of action, is its appeal to the sensible state of happiness, rather than the higher mental powers of understanding and reason. Such an appeal does not facilitate the organisation of communal/political forms of life.

Hearing is a sensory activity, whilst reading with understanding, resembles more an active listening state that is able to both understand and reason about what is being experienced. This auditory space is a space of learning, and is connected to the pleasure principle for Aristotle. We take pleasure, Aristotle argues, in imitations, which aim at the Good and this, in turn, in the case of the fictional narrative involves both areté and diké. This, in Kant’s view, helped to prepare the mind for a commitment to a life of freedom and duty. Robert Wicks in his Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kant’s Critique of Judgement(London, 2007) correctly, claims in our view, that the Kantian power of Judgement presupposes both Aristotelian logic as well as the Aristotelian essence-specifying definition of man as a “rational animal”. Kant, we know classifies beauty as a feeling, but Kant also insists, it is a feeling we can speak with a universal voce about in a spirit of universality and necessity. It is also, according to Kant a feeling that we can encounter in both moral and scientific contexts.

Aesthetic Judgement contains a moment which Kant describes as disinterested, but whilst, in some sense, the judgment is cognitive, it is not saying of any object that the object possesses the objective feature of being beautiful or sublime. We are not attempting. in an aesthetic judgment i.e., to determine what kind of object we are confronting. Wicks points out that the Greek term “aistheta” means “sensible particulars”(P.19), but the judgement as such focuses not upon the object per se, but rather upon what Kant called the form of finality of the object(as an end?). The feeling involved is universalised over the field of judging subjects, and is related to what Kant calls the feeling of life, which in turn is a response to the mystery of life(psuche) and the world. Judgements relating to the sublime, introduce a more direct connection to our moral feeling about ourselves, via a more uncomfortable(displeasurable) feeling of the magnitude or power of nature. These feelings are not conceptually mediated in their pure form, but when we experience them in relation to a text , they are conceptually mediated because of an intended relation to perfection. The purpose of a tragic work for example, relates beauty to the moral good via the ideal conception of rational activity or rational action. Kant argues the following:

“Only that which has the purpose of existence in itself, the human being–who through reason determines his purposes himself, or where he must derive them from external perception can nevertheless compare them to essential and universal purposes and in that case also aesthetically judge their accordance with them–is alone capable of an ideal of beauty, just as the humanity in his person as intelligence, is alone capable of the ideal of perfection, among all the objects in the world.”(P.72 in Wicks)

It is possible that the better translation of this passage would not have contained the term “intelligence”, but rather the term “personality”, or alternatively “rational intelligence”. The importance of the aesthetic idea of the perfection of our humanity is clear in the above quote, however. Tragedy, then, in the process of reading, will be reflected upon via the aesthetic idea of humanity, in relation to areté and diké. The “purpose” of our humanity is knowable apriori, Kant maintains. The essential feature of rationality is a “principle” that attempts to organise the “material” of the world and life, in terms of the “form” of “rationality”. A clearer case of the Kantian commitment to Aristotelian hylomorphic Philosophy would be difficult to find. Reading is primarily a thought activity, in which material is being organised by the forms of principles and ideas, in an auditory space. This auditory space is, in fact, a space for the kind of discourse that is occurring between the author and the reader, via the medium of the language of the text. It is not, as has been suggested, a dialectical transactional phenomenon in which the imagination forms images which say nothing right or wrong about the external world, and which then need “interpretation” by reference to the idea of “seeing-as”. In this kind of hermeneutical/phenomenological account, there is no place for understanding in terms of the categories or categorical essence-specifying judgements such as “Man is a rational animal capable of discourse”. Neither is there space for logical conceptual judgements that rely on the principles of noncontradiction, and/or sufficient reason in order to determine the nature of the relation of the judgements to each other.

Focussing upon the “unreality” of fiction, and claiming that the reference to the world which we find in historical narratives, no longer works for fictional narratives, because there is an absence of what Ricoeur refers to as “productive reference” provided by a “productive imagination”, is a recipe for confusion. Ricoeur also refers to the idea of “application”(P.158), and claims that this idea is an organic part of every hermeneutic project. But these ideas can only be supported against the background of a suspension of the ontological status of the text.(P.158-9). Seeing-as is invoked as part of the power of the imagination and a relation is postulated to the ontological notion of “being-as”, but there is no argument for the validity of this relation.

The author, Ricoeur argues, attempts to “persuade” the reader of the fictional narrative in this postulated psychological transactional context. Aristotle is invoked in this discussion, not for his adherence to the importance of areté and diké in fictional narratives, but in relation to a postulated telos of persuasion which , it is claimed, it is the telos of techné to achieve. The telos of rhetoric is persuasion, Ricoeur argues, but it is not clear that in fictional narrative we are dealing with a rhetorical use of language. Aristotle argues that the means that rhetoric uses to achieve its purposes are ethos, pathos and logos(character, emotion, and enthymeme), and the rhetorician does for the soul what the doctor does for the body, but in the former case, the good aimed at has a political aspect that must be achieved in the external world(e.g. should we defend ourselves by attacking our neighbour or by building a fortified defensive wall?). The rhetorician does not ,as Ricoeur claims, straighforwardly, “refigure” the world, which is manifested in his enthymemes, because the reasoning and understanding involved must obey the Aristotelian principles, one of which insists that something must remain the same throughout the change. That something cannot be “refigured”, either by seeing something as something else, or via “imaginative variation”. The major difference between rhetoric and the other sciences, is that the major premise will not always be a universal and necessary premise of the kind we encounter in the different sciences, e.g. theoretical science–“every effect has a cause”, or practical science–“promises ought to be kept”. The major premise of rhetoric, however must at least be justified in terms of being a judgement of the many, or a judgement of the wise. The conclusion of a rhetorical argument must, therefore, count as either a justified true belief, if it relates to what we ought to believe, or alternatively, count as a good proposal to perform a justified (just) act in the realm of action. The powers of the mind involved in this context, are clearly understanding and reason, and perception and imagination may be involved only in subsidiary roles(e.g. schematising concepts). The form of communication involved in Ricoeur’s problematic transactional process of “refiguring” the beliefs of the reader, is one in which the primary aim is the alteration of attitude, rather than the presentation of a demonstration which proves the authors position. Ricoeur attempts to strengthen his account by adhering to his commitment to the imagination, and claims that the author is attempting to communicate a “vision of the world” to a reader who is “suspicious” because “modern literature is dangerous”(P.163-4). Ricoeur also, controversially claims here, that the structure of the text is not the result of the work of the author and his principles and aesthetic ideas, but rather that the primary cognitive work is brought about by the reader in the act of reading(P.165). The strange idea of an “incomplete text” is postulated as the signal for a phenomenological investigation to begin—an investigation in which expectations are not destined for fulfilment but must rather be dialectically modified. James Joyce’s work Ulysses is invoked because it manifests what Ricoeur refers to as “discordant concordance”. In the reading of such a work:

“Reading becomes a picnic where the author brings the words and the readers the meaning.”(P.169)

Words, on this account are reduced to “signals”, that have an initial configuration, but require refiguration. The Greek “aisthesis”, Ricoeur claims , both reveals and transforms, in a spirit which challenges and confronts traditions and customs. Catharsis, Ricoeur claims, is needed in this context of confronting and challenging tradition and custom. This context is then endowed with the strange combination of making a free choice in the realm of the imaginary. Perhaps catharsis also is required, on the part of the author, to free him/her from the passion of anguish, and the emotion of anxiety. “Imaginative variations” obviously play a significant role in the authors work of composing a plot, which is the framework for the thoughts and actions of agents. Of course, in some sense, a “vision of the world” must be a possible part of the authors creation, but if so, this vision is more a product of understanding and reason, than the freedom of the imagination to vary and transform our traditions and customs. Speaking a language cannot be reduced to speech acts, because it is partly the result of the discourse of generations of speakers, following the customary-traditional grammatical rules of language(in the sense of “grammatical” proposed by Wittgenstein). Without this historically created linguistic form of life, rooted in instinct, but supported by the categories of the understanding/judgement and the principles of reason, authors would not understand the principles and aesthetic ideas they are using to create their work. It is doubtful whether it is correct to speak of “persuasion” in this context, but if it is, then it must be pointed out that persuading someone about something requires a language rooted in instinct but supported by understanding and reason.

Ricoeur speaks of the author attempting to seduce the reader, and even of terrorising the reader, and this relies on the strange idea of an incomplete text which, like an image or a picture of something, can be interpreted in different ways, e.g. as Anscombe points out in her work on Wittgenstein´s Tractatus–an image of a stick boxer-man can be interpreted in different ways depending upon whether one sees the picture as providing an instruction of how one ought to stand(when defending oneself) or ought not to stand(when attacking ones opponent). Signals too, can, of course be interpreted in different ways, but it is actually part of the desired skill of an author to eliminate ambiguity in the text and make his/her meaning clear, especially if something as important as a vision of the world is to be communicated. Ambiguity is anathema to a great author who wields language like a tool with considerable accuracy. Ricoeur concludes the chapter by arguing that Reading itself is unreal(P.179) and the following paradoxical statement is made:

“the more readers become unreal in their reading, the more profound and far-reaching will be the work’s influence on social reality.”(P.179)

These words leave one with the feeling that they belong in a phenomenological dream or nightmare that is cleansed of all categorical understanding and logical reasoning.

September 18, 2022October 9, 2022

Review of Ricoeur’s “Time and Narrative” Vol 3: Essay 16 Historiography and the reality of the past.

Replica of Saxon 'Sinking Bowl' Water Clock, 1931 (water clock; replica) — Replica of Saxon ‘Sinking Bowl’ Water Clock, 1931 (water clock; replica) by Science Museum is licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0

Lucio Bertelli’s essay “Aristotle and History”(https://chs.harvard.edu/chapter/13-lucio-bertelli-aristotle-and-history/(The Center for Hellenic Studies)), maintains that there are many arguments to support the position that Aristotle, in fact, had a complex relation to the domain of knowledge we call Historiography. This obviously entails a rejection of the claim that he underestimated the significance of History. Bertelli’s defence is comprehensive and convincing, embracing as it does many of Aristotle’s works including Metaphysics, Politics, Topics, Metereologica, and the Constitution of Athens.

Bertelli also refers to the work of Raymond Weil in relation to the contention that, when Aristotle is interpreted as being critical of historiography(e.g. in the Poetics), he must be construed as making a distinction between popular empirical chronicled history, and a more philosophically based domain of knowledge that he associated with the works of Herodotus and Thucydides. Indeed, given the obvious fact that Aristotle was one of the first authors to institute a classification framework for knowledge and the sciences, it would be absurd if he could not fit his own work into this system.

Bertelli, also, in the context of this discussion presents us with Von Fritz’s 4 criteria for identifying a domain as historical, namely:

identification and criticism of traditions
chronological arrangement of facts
explanation of causes, and
demonstration of the forces that are operating in bringing about historical events

These criteria may not, however, suffice for either Aristotelian or Kantian accounts of the nature of historical knowledge. For Aristotle, in addition to the above, there would need to be focus on his three principles of change, 4 kinds of change, and the three media of change(space, time, and matter). We can see that in Aristotelian hylomorphic theory, the explanation of change includes a material cause. In his work Metereologica, for example, he refers to the principles of hot and cold operating over long periods of time(e.g. ice-ages, droughts), and how these phenomena transcend the life of both individuals, and their ill governed cities. This kind of account relies heavily on a Kantian ontological distinction, between that which happens to man, and that which he does(his deeds), which is a central part of his reflections upon anthropology or philosophical psychology.

Bertelli contributes to this discussion by pointing out that there is an empirical chronicle of events occurring in contexts of exploration/discovery, which provides us with a lower level of knowledge than that which is in accordance with the complex account of historical knowledge occurring in contexts of explanation/justification (e.g. of the kind we find in the works of both Aristotle and Kant). The chronicle of particular events, following upon one another, probably requires nothing more than accurate description, and the emphasis here is on the difference between the events, rather than their relation( a difference that is sensed rather than thought). A more universal form of conceptualisation, will obviously rely on saying something about these events, in accordance with the categories of the understanding and the principles of reason. The faculty of sensibility with its powers of perception and imagination, will obviously play some kind of role in the evolution and development of historical knowledge, but this activity will then inevitably in its turn be submitted to the work and powers of the understanding and reason in contexts of explanation /justification. For both Aristotle and Kant, particular intuitions of particular events, will be occurring in contexts of exploration/discovery, but knowledge of the past must require both the powers of understanding and reason if historical knowledge is to be generated. The knowledge of the past, that is, is not an imaginative construction or variation, but rather a consequence of our being able to think/judge something about something in accordance with a categorical system and principles of reason.

Ricoeur’s account of History and its relation to the reality of the past, largely disengages from the above epistemological/metaphysical account, and favours instead a hermeneutic/phenomenological commitment which focuses more upon “meaning”(sense and reference) than the true and the good(traditional concerns of rationalism). In this hermeneutic/phenomenological account, the powers of understanding and reason are given less priority than the sensible powers of perception and imagination. The reality of the past focuses, then, not upon the future temporal dimension, so important to Heidegger, but rather on a present that is absent: on a mimetic “trace”, which attempts to represent this absence. Ricoeur invokes the idea of “standing for”, or reference, in his attempt to explain the reality of the past. This requires, in turn, the postulation of a mysterious psychological process of “identification with” the past event, which results in what Ricoeur calls a “reenactment” of the past, and a “splitting” of the event into something with an “inner” face and an “outer” face. Collingwood’s “Idea of History” invoked the idea of an “a priori imagination”, to designate the power of the mind responsible for historical knowledge. Such an idea limits our relation to the past to an “imaginary picture of the past”(P.146):

“At the end of this analysis, we have to say that historians do not know the past at all but only their own thought about the past.”(P.146)

Those familiar with the “theories of meaning” generated by analytical Philosophers, will recognise that the inevitable outcome of these theories, is best illustrated by the early work of Wittgenstein(his “picture theory of meaning”), which led to the untenable position of a logical solipsism that is also shared by Husserl, as a consequence of his leading idea of an internal time consciousness. Denying that an understanding of History is knowledge, is a sceptical response which distorts both the pragmatic work that occurs in its name, and also creates theoretical difficulties, and this is a position that Aristotle, Kant and the later Wittgenstein would not adopt.

Ricoeur presents various dialectical arguments, to rescue this account from the obvious accusation that it violates both the principle of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. One such argument proposes that the historian constructs a “model” or “picture” of the past. The relation of “standing for” is obviously a meaning-relation, but this is construed in terms of the perceptual/imaginative relation of “seeing-as”. This latter term, is one which Wittgenstein used in his later work as a psychological curiosity,rather than as a defining feature of our ontological relation to the world. Indeed he was at pains to point out that one does not see a knife “as” a knife–a knife belongs to the category of instruments and the word is defined by its use—its meaning is not a picture, but rather defined by how we use the word. This is in line with his claim that all “inner” processes are in need of outward criteria, e.g. the human body is the best picture of the soul. The powers of the body are partly constitutive of the idea of the soul that has come down to us from the Greeks, Wittgenstein claims. The form of life(psuche) that is human, is, of course, a language-using form of life, and the power of discourse together with the power of reasoning are essence-specifying characteristics, which we can access via the grammar of language, Wittgenstein argues. The curious psychological phenomenon of noticing an aspect of something does, on the other hand, use the power of the imagination. When the change of seeing an aspect occurs, e.g. I see the drawing of a duck as a rabbit, the phenomenon is half visual experience, and half thought, and in such explorative contexts it is permissible to talk of interpretation of what is seen. Talk of “interpretation”, when we are thinking of a knife or using a knife confuses the two different categories of “see”. Relying on such perceptual/imaginative powers for the “interpretation” of History diminishes the role of Memory involved in our historical understanding of events—a power of memory that is not related to the power of the imagination but rather to the categories of understanding/judgement and the principles of reason. On the Kantian account of the generation of knowledge, sensibility schematises a process with the help of the imagination which then is governed by the rules of thought provided by the categories of understanding/judgement.

September 15, 2022October 10, 2022

Review of Ricoeur’s “time and Narrative” Vol 3: Essay 15–Fictional Time

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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).

September 11, 2022October 10, 2022

A Review of Ricoeur’s “Time and Narrative Vol 3: Essay 14 Historical Time

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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.

August 28, 2022October 10, 2022

Review of Ricoeur’s “Time and Narrative” Vol 3: Essay no 13–Aristotle, Kant, and Heidegger.

Trinity Square, Andrew Marvell's Statue and School — Trinity Square, Andrew Marvell’s Statue and School by David Dixon is licensed under CC-BY-SA 2.0

The dialectical opposition of phenomenological time, and what Ricoeur calls cosmological time, might not be the most useful strategy to use in order to clarify what Newton referred to as “common or ordinary time”. We claim this, because it appears as if a more fruitful dialectical opposition would have been that between, a theoretical account such as that of Newtons and a more metaphysical account such as that provided by Kant. Ricoeur, in the context of his discussion of cosmological time, claims that cosmological time is to be identified with “instants”(P.96). This claim rests upon a misinterpretation of Aristotelian metaphysical theory, which is less concerned with “instants” or “nows”, and more concerned with an extensive metaphysical framework connected to the “before and after” structure of time. It ought also to be pointed out that, Kant too, would reject any analysis of the temporality of a boat sailing downstream into a series of “instants” or “nows”. For Kant, the boat at a previous instant was further upstream and at a subsequent instant was further downstream. Where the boat is at any particular instant is irrelevant to the concept of sailing downstream unless the statement is made in relation to the description “The boat is sailing downstream”. For both Kant and Aristotle, motion requires movement, if it is to be measured, and we know Aristotle rejected Zeno’s, attempts to prove that motion was impossible via the division of space into an infinite number of spaces which would then require an infinite number of “instants” or “nows” to transverse.

The Kantian Metaphysics of Morals claims that “anthropology”, or the empirical study of the phenomenal soul, is a condition of the execution of the moral law. However, the pragmatics of what an agent in fact does, in moral contexts, can be an empirical observational matter belonging in the context of exploration/discovery, which in its turn is related in various ways to the context of explanation/justification. Empirical contexts of exploration/discovery, are obviously important for both the disciplines of History and Sociology. It is in the relation between these two types of context that we encounter the important condition of the role that human powers play in both scientific and ethical situations. Aristotle would have, in these situations, referred extensively to the complex relation of the ideas of areté, epistemé diké and arché. Tragic literature has both its empirical and metaphysical aspects, and the Aristotelian notion of character is an important consideration in any attempt to define the scope and limits of human nature. The roles of Time and Death, would also be important elements in both the creation and appreciation of such tragic writings. It s, however, important to note that, in the case of tragedy and literature in general, the common or ordinary sense of time is presupposed and that furthermore, it is not out of the question that Aristotle’s technical definition of time(the measurement of motion in terms of before and after) is also presupposed.

It is not, however, clear how the phenomenology of internal time consciousness can support this external exercise of “measuring” the conditions and consequences of tragedy. We can say the same of History, namely, that it has a temporal structure in common with tragic literature, and both of these remind us of the temporal structure associated with the moral law, whose primary purpose it is to bring order into the chaos of the humanly created world.

The Phenomenology of Heidegger is, in many respects, more suited to the investigation of aporetic issues such as “What is Time?” “How ought we to deal with the issue of death?” “What is the role of tragedy in our lives?” “What kind of knowledge do we obtain from History?” Relating the investigations connected to the above aporetic issues to the understanding of Being, of course, provides us with a more helpful framework for the likelihood of a positive rational outcome. Ricoeur raises the question whether Heideggers phenomenological investigations are merely “anthropological” in what looks like a pejorative sense, and he also raises the question whether the existential analysis Heidegger provides, is focussed exclusively on the “present” at the expense of the temporal dimensions of the past and the future. Ricoeur answers this latter concern in the negative, and points out that, in fact, Heidegger’s account of Time is primarily focussed on what has been(the past) and what is coming to be(the future) The focus on the present we find in Heidegger, is a consequence of a holistic understanding of how the past-present-future continuum is organised. Heidegger’s account, by implication, refutes any characterisation of Time in terms of a series of instants or nows, but he might well accept that Time is related to events ordered in a series, in which the elements are conceptually related to each other. In such an account the present has intimate conceptual relations to the past and future.

Insofar as Time is connected to the initiation of an action as a result of a decision-process, the decision process is clearly the origin of a process that projects forward along a continuum until the point at which what has been decided has been done. Clearly, in this context both the decision process and the action-sequence are both active and not passive processes, and insofar as this is the case, what is required is the mobilisation of powers which include perception, imagination, understanding, and reasoning. The completed action, is thus the telos, and the formal account of this action is given as an answer to the questions: “What was done?” and “Why was it done?”. The ultimate telos of psuche, is a form of life entailing an ultimate death, which, to some extent, will weigh upon the consciousness of complex human forms of life. The “passive” perception of a boat sailing downstream, will not of course mobilise as many powers as planning the downfall of a king and executing such a plan.

The Heideggerian concepts of Dasein and Being-in-the-world, are helpful in many contexts of explanation/justification, including that of the boat sailing downstream, and the activity of planning to dethrone a king. In the former case Care for the fate of those braving the elements, is the same kind of Care we ought to share for those who have decided to shoulder responsibility for the fate of their communities. Ricoeur, however, claims that the problematic of Dasein:

“overturns the received notions coming from physics and psychology”(P.62)

Which required notions? Einsteins relativity theory merely speaks about a normal clock being attached to a system of coordinates, and presumably that clock(although appearing on the face of it to be a totality of instants), requires two hands in motion moving across its face, to register the passing of seconds, minutes, and hours. The clock, it must be noted, is a cyclical instrument, in contrast to the timing of the passing of days, weeks, months and years of the calendar. Both clock and calendar, however, function in accordance with the logical notions of “before and after”, in the recording of temporal phenomena. Clocks and Calendars are in fact the system of coordinates we use in everyday life, to orient ourselves in relation to the passing of events in the course of our Being-in-the-world. This is a system of coordinates that both the common man and the Historian use as the context of their temporally-related judgements. Is this what Ricoeur calls “objective time?”(P.62). If “objective” is contrasted with a psychological or subjective notion of internal time consciousness, then, there is a risk, that in such an adventure of reflection, we exclude reference to higher mental powers such as understanding, judgment and reason. Such a phenomenological position also requires that the future be described rather than explained or justified. Heidegger’s Phenomenology, on the contrary, does allow reference to a wider field of experience, whose temporality can be explained in the following manner:

“This phenomenon has the unity of a future which makes present in the process of having been: we designate it as temporality.”(Heidegger “Dasein and Temporality”, Being and Time)

Ricoeur acknowledges that in dealing with Dasein, we are dealing, not with the categories that apply to things, but rather what we have called “Existentials”(P.63) In a sense, this is correct ,if we bear in mind that Categories such as “The hypothetical” and “The Categorical” are both applicable to judgments about our human form of life. Ricoeur, in the name of Hermeneutic Phenomenology, wishes to introduce a distinction between understanding and the activity of interpreting. It is interpretation, he argues, that brings Time to our understanding of Language. Such interpretative activity, it is claimed, will unfold what he refers to as the “ecstatic unity” of the future, present, and past. Ricoeur agrees that Heideggers notion of “Care” is vital to the “possibility of Being-a-whole”.(P.64). It is important to note that the spirit of such an investigation is closely related to the spirit of the ancient Greeks. Dasein, Heidegger argues, is a being for whom its very being is a question or an issue for it. This question is responded to, by the emphasis upon Care and possible ways of Being-in-the-world, which are “authentic”, and these two factors testify to the presence of “conscience” and “resoluteness” in the human form of life we share together. Resoluteness brings us full circle back to the issue of Death and the way to deal with it. The best historical example of resoluteness in the face of death, is that of Socrates in his death cell, calming his distraught friends down in the face of the execution of his death sentence. Ricoeur notes the connection of resoluteness to the Stoical position, but accuses Heidegger of advancing a personal conception of authenticity, thus placing his work in a category together with the works of Pascal, Kierkegaard and Sartre. Our view is that Heidegger would oppose much of what is being claimed in these works, but he also would not agree with much of what has been said in the works of Plato, Aristotle and Kant. Sartre’s view of death as an interruption of our “potentiality for being”, is taken up, and Ricoeur asks whether it is not the case that both Sarte and Heideggers accounts would not resolve the aporias around the issues of historicality and cosmic time.(P.67) Ricoeur’s controversial claim, then, is that the Heideggerian idea of Being-towards-death is a conceptual overreaction to the aporias that arise from the dialectical relation of historicality and cosmological time.

Ricoeur claims that Heidegger is attempting to transcend the accounts of Time given by Augustine and Husserl. This, apparently, is especially manifest in Heideggers insistence upon the priority of the future, and its relation to a derivative past, leaving the present to “emerge” as the “time of concern”(P.70) generated by Care. The Aristotelian concept of actualisation also contains an interesting relation of the past, present, and future, and enables one to focus on the way in which potentiality is inherent in any interpretation of the “meaning” of present events–thus avoiding the problem of construing these events as present-at-hand and bracketing our essentially practical relation to the world. Modern Scientific theory may well force us to construe the events happening in the world, in terms of something happening “present-at-hand”, and this in turn may well then force us to “project” temporality onto such a scene through an appeal to an abstract totality of “instants” or “nows”. The more harmless consequences of such a position, is evidenced in Einsteins appeal to the phenomenon of time in the form of a clock, rather than any attempt to analyse the phenomenon, i.e. he develops a position which ends with attaching a clock to a system of coordinates in order to correctly situate events in a space-time continuum.

Ricoeur acknowledges a debt to Heidegger and the concept of historicality, which together with Care, provides us with the beginnings of an interesting practical account of Time. Such an account can be used in pure contexts of observation, such as watching a boat sail downstream. Here there is no appeal to any pure succession of instants or nows which are then merely counted. The “order” of events is much more complex, and better conceived of, in terms of the actualisation process referred to by Aristotle, which in turn, can then be connected systematically to the categories of Judgement Kant proposed. All this, of course, goes well beyond the mere “stretching along” the temporal continuum Ricouer refers to in his attempt to answer the question of the “Who” of Dasein.(P.73). He does, of course, also mention the important aspects of resoluteness, promising, and guilt in the context of this discussion, and this again appears to conjure up the actualising process of hylomorphism and the Critical Philosophy of Kant. Kant’s contribution is to complement the idea of resoluteness with that of Duty. For Kant, then, the “Who” of Dasein, is very much tied to the future outlined in his idea of a kingdom of ends, in which globalisation results in a world-community where we are all “cosmopolitan citizens”. For Kant, all peoples, all nations, are involved in the creation of a future in which all activities aim at the Good, and in which areté, epistemé, arché and diké will play an important role. Heidegger’s concept of being thrown into a ready-made world at birth, is also a helpful account, if the “meaning” of the past for those who find themselves in the future of that past, consists of living in the midst of a massive number of projects in the process of being actualised. To this extent the past exerts an inevitable influence upon the present, and also on the possibility we all have to realise our inherent potential. An early death is especially tragic in such circumstances because the “promise” of the future has been annihilated. Whether or not I can actualise my potentiality may well depend on the influence of the community and its projects. Heidegger refers to this community as “They”, and “they”, for example, may well eschew all peaceful attempts to achieve a world cosmopolitan society, and may furthermore see their relation to other communities through the spectacles of “us and them”, harbouring warlike attitudes to all who beg to differ on important issues such as race and ethnicity—as was in fact the case in 1929 in Heidegger’s Germany.

Ricoeur also refers to Heidegger’s idea of a “moment of vision”, which assists us in moving from being enveloped in the attitudes and platitudes which originate from the “They”, and toward an authentic form of existence, where one is no longer a prisoner of ones thrown-ness into the world. These reflections take us inevitably into the domain of the social and human sciences, which appear to base their case on a multitude of concrete facts that have largely been selected in a spirit of description, rather than with any intent to explain or justify. This former spirit, then, wishes to identify what is objective with what is presently verifiable, in accordance with scientific procedures dominated by observation, and the subsequent manipulation and measurement of variables.

Heidegger detects in the above discussion of objectivity in the social sciences, an epistemological commitment to what is present-at-hand and ready-to-hand: he sees a form of inquiry that ignores Dasein’s commerce with the world, and which , furthermore, involves both existence alongside the things of the world, and existence with other human beings, Science in general and social sciences in particular, concern themselves not with the way in which we “live” time, but rather with the way in which we “reckon with time” and quantify time.

Ricoeur believes that Aristotle connected Time with a soul that distinguishes between two instants and counts the intervals.(P.85). This account omits a key reference to “motion”, and “before and after”, which actually enables the philosopher to glimpse the essence of world-time, whether it be via a boat sailing downstream, or the death of Macbeth. It also omits key references to arché, which, when connected to time, becomes the transcendental principle that makes temporal experience possible. Heidegger suggests that the modern conception of cosmological time has its origins in the Aristotelian writings on Physics, but this is misleading given the importance that is placed on metaphysics in these writings, and given the fact that metaphysics of the hylomorphic kind is largely rejected by both modern Natural and Social Scientists. Ricoeur is doubtful about this Heideggerian diagnosis, but he too misconceives Aristotle’s position:

“the lesson we have drawn from our reading of the famous passage in Aristotle’s Physics is that there is no conceivable transition—either in one direction or the other—between indistinguishable, anonymous instants and the lived-through present.”(P.88)

Reading just the passage referred to, is not sufficient evidence for the accusation that Aristotelian “Nows” are “anonymous instants”. The suggestion by Aristotle, that the lived through present, is a future of a past actualised, is also evidence against the above interpretation. Physical concepts such as “stretching along”, have no place in the principle-regulated Aristotelian synthesis of past-present-future. Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis, however, is infinitely preferable to those analyses provided by Husserl and Augustine, but this too must be qualified by his somewhat confusing accounts of Hylomorphic and Critical Philosophy.

Ricoeur mentions the scientific revision of the age of the world from 6 thousand to 6 billion years, and the resistance that needed to be overcome before acceptance of this so-called “fact” could be stablished. Aristotle, in spite of his belief in principles, also believed in the infinite apeiron, which aligns best with the steady-state scientific theory of an everlasting universe without beginning or end— a universe without limits but not without principles.

Ricoeur claims that ordinary time, like cosmological time, relies on a “picture” of point-like “nows” in a series. Time, according to this picture runs from one now to another, it is claimed, but reference to the “before-after” component is omitted, as is reference to actualisation processes. The principles governing ordinary time, insofar as Aristotle is concerned, are to be found in his work “Metaphysics”. Here he presents three principles: 1. That from which a thing changes.2. That toward which a thing changes. and 3. The thing that endures throughout the change. Change, for Aristotle then, is the arena for actualisation processes of various kinds: processes which are related to their own essence specifying principles. This, as we have noted, is not situated in a continuum of change stretching from a beginning point, but rather on an everlasting cycle that continues forever. The scientific “hypothesis” that the universe is 6 billion years old remains just that, until it is “proved” that “nothing” preceded the Being of the universe, i.e. that there was no space before the Universe began . Presumably this means that rejecting such a position entails maintaining that space just sprang into existence like Sartre’s partridges from pools of nothingness.

The Philosophical scientist, then, has no choice but to accept the Kantian claim, that Time is a transcendental condition of both inner and outer experience. Such a scientist ought also to accept the principles of change outlined above, and the metaphysics upon which hylomorphic theory is grounded: a theory that refers to 4 kinds of change, 4 causes of change and 3 media of change(space, time, matter). Philosophical science ought also to accept ordinary or common time as measured by clocks and calendars(with some minor adjustments), and feel no need to perform any kind of “reduction” upon ordinary temporal experience ordered in terms of before and after, and Care for origins and ends. The extent to which origins and ends are disguised in the discourse of “They”, is the extent to which we note that ordinary authenticity is an achievement of no small measure, requiring epistemé, areté, diké and arché.

Ricoeur ends with the conclusion that he believes phenomenology to be an important interlocutor in relation to the above questions. He also admits that the aporias connected to Time outrun the resources of phenomenological investigation.

August 19, 2022October 10, 2022

Review of Ricoeur’s “Time and Narrative”:Vol 3: Essay no 12 Husserl and Kant.

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Ricoeur concludes this chapter with the claim that Kant is blind to any account of Time which attempts to understand the phenomenon of time via a phenomenology of internal-time consciousness. This state of affairs, Ricoeur attributes to a commitment on the part of Kant, to the Newtonian objective view of Time, which in its turn, is committed to an epistemological ontology of nature. For those familiar with the writings of Kant, especially his work “Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View”, we find Kant defining the scope of the domain of Philosophy in terms of 4 fundamental questions, the fourth one of which is “What is a human Being?”, and throughout this work we find this question answered by reference to a number of Aristotelian hylomorphic assumptions. It is important to note here that, in the Anthropology, Kant presents the soul as inserted in a cosmopolitan context which immediately calls into question the above claim by Ricoeur, namely, that Kant is committed to an epistemological ontology of nature.

Aristotle begins his essay “On the Soul” with an account of psuche which relies on the fundamental elements of “movement” and “sensation”. Aristotle also claims that principles “form” these elements and reference is made to Anaxagoras:

“Anaxagoras, as we have said above, seems to distinguish between soul and thought, but in practice he treats them as a single substance, except that it is thought that he specially posits as the principle of all things…..He assigns both characteristics, knowing and origination of movement, to the same principle when he says that it was thought that set the whole in movement.”(405, 14-18)

Aristotle summarises his initial historical summary of views on the soul, in the following way:

“All, then, it may be said, characterise the soul by three marks, Movement, Sensation, Incorporeality, and each of these is traced back to first principles.”(405b10-14)

The term “Principle”, for Aristotle is equivalent to the complete account of what it is that the principle is attempting to explain or justify. In terms of the concepts of actuality and potentiality, Aristotle maintains that the soul is the actuality of a human body, and its potential for life, discourse, and rationality. The organised system of organs constituting the human form of life is, of course, a decisive material cause or condition of this form of life. The body is the material base from which the concrete activities of life and knowledge actualise themselves(Book II 1. 20-28). The account of the soul Aristotle finally settles upon. is complex, but can be summarised in terms of his essence-specifying definition, namely, rational animal capable of discourse. Actuality is part of this account but it is not the stark reality of a referent standing present-at-hand. Rather, the following kind of account is given:

“Suppose that the eye were an animal–sight would have been its soul, for sight is the substance of the eye which corresponds to the account, the eye being merely the matter of the seeing.”(II,I,18-20)

Matter, on this hylomorphic account, is actual being, and form is potential-being. The psychic powers of man are spread out over forms of life stretching from nutritive activity to the most complex forms of thinking activity, e.g., the powers of discourse and rationality. The essence of the power involved is thus captured by an essence-specifying definition of the principle involved, e.g. rationality is connected to the principles constituting the categories, and the principles used in reasoning,(noncontradiction, sufficient reason). Thinking is a power connected to both the powers of discourse, and the powers of rationality. Aristotle likens thinking unto perception, because both powers, in their different ways, discriminate and are aware of “what exists”.(427a, III,19-22). Thinking does, however, differentiate itself from perceiving in its relation to the normative. Thinking is:

“..that in which we find rightness and wrongness—rightness in understanding, knowledge, true opinion, wrongness in their opposites: for perception of the special objects of sense is always free from error, and found in all animals, while it is possible to think falsely as well as truly, and thought is found only where there is discourse of reason.”(III, 427b, 9-14)

Aristotle continues in a Kantian vein and claims:

“Thinking is different from perceiving, and it held to be in part imagination, in part judgement, We must, therefore, first mark off the sphere of imagination and then speak of judgement.”( III, 427b,28-29)

Imagination, for Aristotle, is a sensory power which, in itself, cannot “know” anything, but has important contact with material objects and events in the external world. Thought, on the contrary, is in a sense immaterial, and without any nature, being a pure potentiality, and it is this part of the soul that is, on Aristotles account, the “place of forms”. Forms, or principles, then, are intimately related to judgements. On Kant’s account these principles or forms were embodied in his “categories” of judgement. Aristotle, however , spoke of “categories of existence” rather than “categories of judgement”. These two positions are not necessarily contradictory, but there is nevertheless no attempt by Kant to deal directly with the issue of their relation.Aristotle concludes by claiming that existing things:

“are either sensible or thinkable, and knowledge is, in a way, what is knowable and sensation is in a way what is sensible.”(431b III, 21-23)

The relation of sense to knowledge claims(judgements) insofar as the soul is concerned is stated in the following:

“It follows that the soul is analogous to the hand: for as the hand is a tool of tools, so thought is the form of forms, and sense the form of sensible things.”(432A, III, 1-2)

The complexity of judgements is reflected in the claim that thought appears to be about what one encounters with ones senses. The grammatical form of the judgement reflects this fact—the subject is the matter, and the predicate is the form the matter takes( the predicate, that is, is the further conceptualisation of that matter of the subject which is already conceptualised in the presentation of the subject). The consequent “form” of the judgement is, that it judges something about something, aiming at the truth. Judgements, in Aristotle’s logic, then, combine to form arguments, which also produce the knowledge of what is true, on the condition of the truth of the premises and the correctness of the reasoning process. In these arguments, thoughts(and not images) are synthesised. This is confirmed by Aristotle:

“Imagination is different from assertion or denial: for what is true or false involves a synthesis of thoughts. In what will the primary thoughts differ from images? Must we not say that neither these not even other thoughts are images, though they necessarily involve them?”(432a III, 10-12)

Kant gave us an account of how the imagination schematises our concepts at a level prior to that of judgement, in which either sensory identification or a concept is related to another concept. In the context of action, however, both Aristotle and Kant would agree that deliberation can be associated with imagination, and both can be involved in a decision-making process of whether to do X or Y. Insofar as judgement is involved in such a process, it is the particular judgement at the end of a chain of reasoning, that moves the agent to act. Imagination is not obviously present in the universal premise that inevitably begins such a chain of reasoning. Such a chain relates concepts to what ought to be done universally and necessarily.

There is no direct reference to Time in the above Aristotelian reflections upon the nature of the soul and the human being, but Aristotle’s essay “On the Soul”, does close with a discussion of death, and how it involves a permanent loss of the sense of touch which Aristotle claims founds our relation to the external world:

“without touch it is impossible for an animal to be”( 435b III, 17-18)

It is when a human being is conditioned by a lapse of time, that memory supervenes as a modification of his sensory relation to his environment. Some animals possess memories but, Aristotle argues, no animals possess the powers of recollection, language or reason. Memory is, of course, necessary for the perception of time, and the relational perception of before and after. Recollection, on the other hand is, Aristotle claims, a “mode of inference” which is a simpler kind of investigation, and also a part of a context of exploration/discovery in which imagination is involved. This is an important part of the process of how we acquire sensory knowledge.

Now it is clear, that Kant relies on the above principles in relation to his reflections upon Time. Newton, as Ricoeur wishes to maintain, does not contribute anything essential to Kant’s account of the a priori form of inner intuition, which is involved in recollection, perception, and expectation. Newtons essentially mathematical accounts of Space and Motion, carry with them temporal implications, but Newton does not think of Time in terms of our faculty of an inner phenomenon:

“Absolute time and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature flows equally without relation to anything external, and by another name is called duration: relative, apparent, and common time is some sensible and external (whether accurate or inequable) measure of duration by means of motion which is commonly used instead of true time such as an hour, a day, a month, a year.”(Scholium to Newtons Philosophiae Naturalis Principa Mathematica)

Aristotle would reject the claim that the mathematical idea of Time is the true absolute, which “flows equably”. For Aristotle, on the contrary, the mathematical idea of a number series presupposes the “before-after” structure of time. He would, however, acknowledge that the number series is necessary to measure duration, if one wishes to compare durations with one another. These durations must nevertheless be measured “in terms of before and after”.

For Kant too, the Newtonian mathematical view of time, suggests a relativity(to absolute time) we do not encounter in the Aristotelian or Kantian accounts. In contrast to this trio of thinkers(Aristotle. Newton, Kant), Husserl wishes to bracket what he called “objective time”, and interiorise the intuition of time: thereafter enabling him to attempt to “describe” the phenomenon in terms of a phenomenology of internal time-consciousness:

“But what is actually excluded from the field of appearing under the name of objective time? Precisely world time, which Kant showed is a presupposition of any determination of an object.”(Ricoeur, P24)

On the Husserlian account, the “flow of consciousness” is synchronised with the so called “objective flow of time”(P.24), which is then characterised in terms of “one after the other”. Husserl is clearly not engaged in either an Aristotelian or Kantian investigation, in which one begins at the level of Principles, and moves to the level of phenomena. Rather, the reverse is the case, and instead of principles, Husserl goes in search of descriptive a priori truths, that mysteriously emerge from the phenomenological reduction of a world that is placed in brackets.

What emerges from this investigation is not an objective continuum organised in terms of before and after, but rather a field of consciousness, from which one derives the activities of protention, retention, and recollection. A very simple perceptual encounter with an enduring sound, is used to illustrate these concepts. For example, there is a retention of the phase of the sound that has just passed, and a protention of the coming phase. A very physical/materially oriented discussion ensues in which there is talk of:

“the fusion of the present with its horizon of the past in the continuity of the phase.”(P.29)

and this is subsequently translated into the mental language of consciousness. It is maintained that an “impressional consciousness” is transformed into a retentional form of consciousness. Remembrance is then invoked, in order to relate retention to memory and “remembering”. This in turn introduces the role of the imagination into the account, and we are then invited to consider the differences between present retention and representation in general. Representation associated with expectation, however, is not discussed, and it may well be that the focus of Husserls account on the primacy or perception is the reason for the omission:

“Husserl conceives of expectation as little more than an anticipation of perception.”(P.37)

Ricoeur points to this anomaly in Husserl’s account, and refers to the concept of Care in Heideggers work “Being and Time”. Care is fundamentally a future oriented phenomenon: intentionality is projected into the future. The Husserlian reduction, on the other hand, appears to be committed to the present and the past: a past in which memory preserves the intentionality of what was once present in a “flux of consciousness”, ” a flux that constitutes itself”(P.42). Representation, on this kind of account, becomes merely an impression in this flux.

The Kantian account is principle-oriented, and exactly for this reason is, contrary to Ricoeurs claims, a refutation of the type of account Husserlian presents us with. Insofar as “representation” can be both what happens to one when one is passively affected, as well as something which we do(an activity), it takes both intuitive and conceptual forms. Insofar as we are dealing with representation in its intuitive form, we are dealing with objects that are affecting us, and insofar as we are dealing with representation in its conceptual form, it is primarily an activity of the faculty of the understanding(that is, of course, as we have claimed, connected to the schemata of the imagination and the faculty of sensibility). Schemata, related to Time via the category(of the understanding)of substance is characterised by Kant as follows:

“The schema of substance is permanence of the real in time, that is, the representation of the real as a substrate of empirical determination of time in general and so as abiding while all else changes.”(a143, B183)

This is an important aspect of our understanding of what is real ,and consequently also an aspect of our judgements relating to the real. The permanence of the real is evident in the example Kant chooses, of the boat sailing down the river. This is a real event actualising in the present and relying on the following Aristotelian principles:

That from which a thing changes
That toward which a thing changes
That which stays the same and endures throughout the change.

This is more than the mere “following of a rule”. Rather, what we have here, is a principle guided succession taking place in accordance with the organisation of sensible experience in terms of “before” and “after”.

Ricoeur acknowledges in the context of this discussion the distinction between contexts of exploration/discovery, and contexts of explanation/justification. In the former we are concerned with the actualisation of the schematisation of the concept, and in the latter, we are concerned with a category that is related to the schema via principles. For Ricoeur, however, this transcendental determination of Time does not reach down into the depths of the consciousness of our existence. We need, Ricoeur argues, to take a more indirect path, if we are to correctly describe the phenomena involved in such consciousness, namely that of the phenomenology of internal time consciousness. But even this indirect appeal will not suffice for a complete account because, Ricoeur argues, both the Kantian and the phenomenological accounts “borrow from each other” and “mutually exclude each other”(P.57)

Ricoeur then startlingly claims that Kantian Transcendental Critical Philosophy lies closer in spirit to Augustinian Philosophy than it does to Aristotelian Hylomorphic Philosophy. The chapter ends with the accusation that Kant is attempting to tie Time to an ontology of nature that is more ideal than real, but here again the argument presented is obscuring the fact that it is Aristotle’s view of nature and time that is being presupposed in the Kantian account(and not the Newtonian mathematical view of nature and time).

August 9, 2022October 10, 2022

Essay 11: Review of Ricoeur’s “Time and Narrative” Vol3: Time of the Soul vs Time of the World.

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Ricoeur admits, in his Introduction to this volume, that he has been guided in his investigations by the “point of view” of the Phenomenology of time-consciousness. This, of course, became obvious in his choice of situating his principle of “point of view” in a Hegelian dialectical framework in which the focus is the refiguration process in relation to which temporality is mysteriously transformed in a dialectical synthesis.

Ricoeur refers again to his earlier thesis of the dissymmetry of fictional and historical narrative, and again appears to rest his entire case on an epistemological appeal to Frege’s concept of Reference. This appeal must have the consequence that, in the case of any attempt to specify the essence of fictional narrative and its appeal to underlying imperative concerns, the idea, form, or principle of “The Good” must be regarded as “unreal”, presumably because of the contrast with the “real” concern of historical narratives, that are based on actual documentation of events emanating from significant institutions of society. This concern with a “real past”, in contrast to the concern of fictional narrative with a possible past and possible future, also becomes a major differentiating characteristic between the two forms of narrative.

All activity, Aristotle argued in his Nichomachean Ethics, aims at The Good, and this surely must cover both fictional and historical narratives. This is not to deny that narratives concerned with the statement of facts about past states of affairs, have a different structure to narratives whose primary function is to appeal to the Good that has been brought about by the rational contemplation of Action by a character or agent. It is also important to note that however different the structures, we are still dealing with a logic of argumentation, in which premises are related to each other in rigidly definable ways that lead to universal and necessary conclusions. The major premise “We ought to keep promises”, is a “real” imperative, demanding real action, and real reasoning, should we ever find ourself in an arena where such activity is required.

Ricoeur argues that there is a considerable degree of tension between the phenomenological and cosmological accounts of Time, and he clearly considers Augustine to represent the former position, and Aristotle the latter. He does, however, have critical views of some aspects of Augustine’s account. In his opening chapter entitled “The Time of the Soul and the Time of the World. The Dispute between Augustine and Aristotle”, we encounter the following:

“The major failure of the Augustinian theory is that it is unsuccessful in substituting a psychological conception of time for a cosmological one.”(P.12)

Ricoeur adds that, even when it is the case that the cosmological account can be supplemented by a psychological account, there is nevertheless an irresolvable disagreement, when the alternatives are presented independently of each other. Augustine, he argues, provides us with a lasting solution to what he refers to as Aristotle’s problematic failure, to articulate the relation between soul and time. Apparently, the major issue for Ricouer, is to reconcile the measurement of motion with, for example, the Augustinian postulate of distentio animi, and the souls “experience of time”. This experience is primarily related to the activity of memory and expectation. Ricoeur does, however, point out that Augustine does not succeed is providing us with a measure of this activity of the mind, which can then be applied or correlated with movement or motion in the external world. It is also claimed that the phenomenology of perception does not play any significant role in Augustinian theory. This, of course, is an allusion of things to come in the name of giving an account of the problematic relation between the intuitions of space and time in the activity of the measurement of time. This kind of problem does not arise in Kant’s example of the perception of the boat sailing downstream. For Kant, there is no problem that there is both a before and an after in both the movement of the boat and in the consciousness involved in the perception of this movement. Kant’s solution to the Augustinian problem makes recourse to the Aristotelian Hylomorphic solution. The boat, water, and everything material in the above experience is given to the mind of the perceiver, and the mind then actively organises the experience in accordance with the one dimensional continuum of befores and afters. The category of causation which attributes causal power to the boat and the motion of the water are part of this process of organisation.

In the above example of the boat sailing downstream, we see the concepts of form(principle), matter, potentiality and actuality, interacting to form a relatively simple phenomenon. The pure temporal intuition of the movement of the boat may not on its own, involve the category of causation, but is purely a sensible movement of the mind brought about by the movement of the boat. There is absolutely no point, in interiorising this experience and subsequently asking if there is an impression localised in the mind which is independently identifiable, and which calls for independent naming or describing. Since, however, the mind, as Aristotle points out in his Metaphysics, “desires to know”, there will undoubtedly be engagement of the above pure intuitions with other cognitive powers of the mind such as the understanding and reason: and we might well end up making the judgement “The boat is sailing downstream”. The power of the imagination will also be involved in such a judgment, and its activity will consist in providing the “schema” to organise the representations connected to this entire perceptual scene. This will be a prelude to thinking that the boat is sailing downstream. It is not the case, however, as the phenomenologists(Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Ricouer) maintain, namely that it is the imagination that is the primary power responsible for organising this experience. Perception(discrimination) the categories of the understanding/judgement, and the principles of reasoning, are all involved in the knowledge claim, “The boat is sailing downstream”.

Trying, as Frege did, to distinguish between the sense and reference of the above statement might be useful if the concept of “sense” and not the concept of “reference” becomes the primary bearer of the meaning of the above statement. Sense, characterised that is, as away of presenting the reference, would then be related to intuitions, categories, and reasoning). Ricouer, however, as we know, prefers to locate the concepts of Frege in a phenomenological context, especially a Husserlian context of internal time consciousness, which emphasises sensibility at the cost of other higher cognitive powers.

The pure experience of time, then, must of necessity be relative, considering the fact that we are dealing here with an infinite medium(we cannot conceive of a beginning or ending of time without presupposing time, i.e. for every before there must be a conceivable event before and for every after there must be a conceivable event after). The elements which assist in the division of this infinite continuum are the elements of “nows” and “thens”, conceived of in a hylomorphic framework of potentiality and actuality, form, and matter, in a context of a desire to know and a desire to aim at the good. Once we add the activity of measurement into this equation, there must be something external to measure, since our thoughts per definition do not have magnitude, and can not therefore be mathematically measurable. Of course, it is true that were there no minds in existence, there would be no measurable time, because there would be no minds to measure the motion of external events.

After discussing the problems involved in the “experience of time”, and the introduction of discontinuity into the continuum at that point when a now is actualised, and becomes a potential then, as time goes by, Ricoeur calls again upon Augustine and the idea of a “threefold present”(which maintains that the past and the future only manifest themselves in the present). This, Ricoeur points out, is a theoretical account that appears to abstract from the movement perceived. Aristotle’s account, on the other hand, rightly insists upon external movement or motion, as an essential component in any experience of time, on the familiar grounds that thought does not have a magnitude, and therefore cannot move or be measured.Time is, Aristotle argues, as does Kant, a one dimensional infinite continuity.

Yet it is Augustine who is Ricoeur’s lodestar in this discussion and this is illustrated in the following quote:

“The distension of the soul cannot produce the extension of time: the dynamism of movement alone cannot generate the dialectics of the threefold present.”(P.21)

This dialectic is then conceived of in terms of the contrast between the phenomenology of internal time consciousness and the objective succession of the boat sailing downstream.

August 6, 2022October 10, 2022

Review of Ricoeur’s “Time and Narrative” Volume 2: Tales about Time–Essay no 10

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In the previous essay, it was suggested that it is the conceptualisation of the world that gives rise to Dasein’s understanding of Being-in-the-world, rather than, as has been suggested, the imagination and its sensory “point of view”. The imagination, then, can provide us with a “representation” of lived time, a representation that certainly has a structural commonality with the temporality of actual lived time. We also suggested that the epistemological characterisation of fictional narrative, which prioritises its relation to particular states of affairs in the real actual lived world, is not helpful insofar as ontology is concerned—insofar, that is , that this approach will not enable us to arrive at an essence-specifying characterisation of narration. We maintained that the “historical voice” is probably being used in fictional narrative, and whilst the actual past may be the primary focus for the historian, it is a possible past and possible future, that is the focus of attention for the fictional narrator.

“Ordinary temporality”, Ricoeur argues, is refigured in fiction, in a process which he describes in terms of “imaginary variations”. We should recall, in the context of this discussion, the appeal in the previous chapter, to “games with time”, and the experimentation with rules that could even include “shattering” the normal temporal relation Dasein has to its world. In the world of the imagination, “everything is possible”, i.e. everything is a possible schema of something.

Ricoeur explores three works in order to illustrate this re-figuration of time and its “imaginary variations”, as part of the process of elaborating upon what he calls the hierarchical depths of temporal experience. Literature, Ricoeur argues:

“proceeds by way of imaginative variations.Each of the three works under consideration, freeing itself in this way from the most linear aspects of time, in return, explore the hierarchical levels that form the depth of temporal experience. Fictional narrative, thus detects temporalities that are more or less extended, offering in each instance, a different figure of recollection of eternity in or out of time, and, I will add, of the secret relation between eternity and death. Let us now allow ourselves to be instructed by these three tales about time.”(P.101)

The above reference to eternity, to a time that stretches beyond the scope of human sensibility, and therefore presumably of the sensory aspect of our imagination, must be something which is conceptualised, and therefore understood by the categorical part of our minds, interacting in accordance with the principles of the reasoning part of our minds. It is possible, of course, in the case of any concept, to discover in a process of conceptual analysis, the intuitive schema of that concept which, of course, is a construct of the power of the imagination. Referring to this in terms of “recollection”, and as a “secret relation between eternity and death”, appears to exclude conceptualisation and reasoning, thus leaving the imagination free to operate without constraint, and in the spirit of “everything is possible”(perhaps in relation to the rules of sensibility, whatever they may be).

Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs Dalloway” is the first “tale about time” Ricoeur consults. The description he provides of the events of the novel, however, in no way “shatters” the temporality of the represented time of the characters. Indeed the whole scene of the narrative appears to be a June day in 1923. Time is represented in the same way it would be in any report given by someone to someone else, of the activity of people they know on a particular summer day. The actions, thoughts, and emotions of the characters of Mrs Dalloway occur in a before-after sequence, and there is no difficulty with understanding the represented time of the narrative, which occurs in hearing distance of Big Ben—clocks and calendars appear to be functioning normally in the narrative in the same way in which they do in actual lived time. The above “dating”, anchors the represented time in the lived time of History, and the events and activities are all conceivable in the same way as they would be in a narrative report about the real events of that time.

The problem with attempting to define fictional narrative in terms of its epistemological correspondence with reality is that this kind of approach does not acknowledge Aristotle’s “many meanings of Being”, nor is there any acknowledgement of the Late Wittgenstein’s insistence that Language can indeed be used for saying how things are(even if there are many other uses as well). There are, as Wittgenstein perhaps misleadingly put the matter, “many different language games”, and language games are, on this account , intimately related to the Aristotelian sounding notion of “forms of life”(Psuche). Forms of life are obviously more related to practical activities than theoretical speculation, and the activity connected with the speaking of language moves, for Wittgenstein, from asking for the meaning of a word, to asking for how the word is used in a language game embedded in a particular form of life. Heidegger and Wittgenstein concentrate in their very different ways upon the representing of “possibilities”. For Heidegger, this concentration involves the representation of “possible ways to be”. The representation by Virginia Woolf of one day(in 1923) in the life of Mrs Dalloway represents possible human interactions on that day, but there is also involved in the creation of this work, an important universal dimension which intends to say something important and necessary about the characters of the novel and the time they lived in. We can see in this literary example, a startling similarity to the way in which language is used in Historical writings. The difference, between these two different forms of narration, relates to the the difference of intention with which historians write( attempting to provide knowledge of historical events) and the intention of a creative artist who is seeking to provide knowledge of a very different kind to their readers, e.g. knowledge of ethics and what ought and ought not to be done. In the case of the Historian, documentation from significant institutions of society, and evidence, form the scientific foundation for the judgements that are being made. Of course, it is true that the name “Mrs Dalloway” is not the name of a real person, and is not therefore connected in the normal way with an actual birth, childhood, adolescence, and adult life. Historical writings concern themselves with the real actions, thoughts, emotions, and judgements of real people.Fictional names have a complex logic of their own, but the logical relation between a real action and its reason in History, and a represented action and its reason in fiction, is the same: the same holds for represented judgement and the reasons for the judgment.

The Kantian analysis of aesthetic judgment refers to the idea of exemplary universality and it is this type of universality that is operating in the realm of the aesthetic choices being made by Woolf in the creation of the characters for her novels. This, of course, is not the same form of universality the Historian is aiming for, in the production of their writings. The skill of both types of narrators lies in their use of language to accomplish the different goals that arise from these different forms of life. In the case of Virginia Woolf the aesthetic quality of her work will largely be determined by her skillful use of the language she uses to represent the characters and the time and place they live in. The temporal structures that are represented, accord well with the temporal structures of our life-worlds. Big Ben signals the time in this “possible world”, in exactly the same way as it does in our actual real world.

It is only if one is a prisoner of an epistemologically oriented theory of language(which claims that the “actual” existence and description or naming of this existence, is the primary use of language overshadowing all other uses of language) that one can allow oneself to believe that “everything is possible” in fiction, even the dissolution of temporality. The mere potentiality of the fictional medium to conceptualise possible pasts and possible futures, maintains the structure of a coherent past-present-future continuum. The language of fiction is embedded in a human form of life in the same way as our everyday language is embedded in our everyday forms of life. The account of a character committing suicide is not significantly different to the real account of a real suicide and the one account could never be confused with the other, because we know that in the case of fiction we are dealing with mimesis(imitative representation). If, for example, Mrs Dalloway sat on a pin, her behavioural reaction will be evaluated in exactly the same way as it would in an everyday context in which we express sympathy. If she cries out in pain we understand that the pin was the cause. If she sat on a pin and did not respond at all, we would understand that there was a reason for the inhibition of a reaction.

Ricoeur claimed that there was a refiguration of time occurring in fictional narrative. It is not clear what is meant with this term. All that appears to be happening is that we are encountering “time represented”. We suggested in the last part of this review, that the term “point of view” may be playing a supporting role for Ricoeur’s epistemologically oriented theory. This is contained in Ricoeur’s concluding remarks about Mrs Dalloway:

“This experience of time is neither that of Clarissa nor that of Septimus: it is neither that of Peter nor that of any other character. Instead, it is suggested to the reader by the revelation of one solitary experience in another solitary experience. It is this network taken as a whole, that is the experience of time in Mrs Dalloway”(P.112)

This notion of a “point of view” and its connection to “solitary” or solipsistic experiences, is a clear reference to the interiorisation of experience that occurred as a consequence of the epistemological discussions of the 20th century. Once this interiorisation of experience has established itself in our theoretical speculations, there can be no other explanatory/justificatory appeal than to mythical ideas of a whole created by the sum of its parts: or a whole view created by the sum of the points of view involved. We do not need to return to Gestalt Psychology to realise that the whole is more than the sum of the parts, or rather, that it is something completely different—something like the meaning of Being.

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann is, Ricoeur argues, a novel about time(P.112,) but the analysis is once again steered by this solipsistic idea of “point of view”, applied collectively to both those that live on the Magic Mountain, and those that do not. The mountain-dwellers that live in the sanitorium do not, Ricoeur claims, follow the rhythm of clocks and calendars, and this is sufficient for him to invoke a dialectical method which emphasises the discordance in the two “points of view”, and also to take a discordant view of Time which discards the Time of the Philosophers(Aristotle and Kant). The principal scene of the action is the Berghof sanitorium, which treats patients suffering from tuberculosis–a deadly sickness in the early 1900’s. Time, sickness, and a nihilistic view of Western Culture are the three dimensions Ricoeur fixates upon in order to dialectically interpret this work. We see this dialectical approach at work in his concluding remarks, suggesting we divide the internal from the external in order to set up an Augustinian discordance:

“As the relations between those down below and those up above are weakened, a new space of explanation unfolds, one in which the paradoxes brought to light are precisely those that afflict the internal experience of time, when it is freed from its relation to chronological time.”(P.130)

Proust’s work, “Remembrance of Things Past”, is the third novel Ricoeur consults in his attempt to illustrate what he calls the “refiguration” process that is taking place in fictional narratives. Ricoeur claims that what is at stake in this work, is a search for the truth. Whether or not the idea of “lost identity” is really the central theme of “Remembrance” is an issue for Ricoeur, who claims that this may not be the best description of what is going on in this work. Ricoeur suggests instead, the alternative, the “search for lost unity”:

“The question is then no longer how the philosophy of lost unity could have degenerated into a quest for lost time but how the search for lost time, taken as the founding matrix of the work, accomplishes through strictly narrative means, the recovery of the Romantic problem of lost unity.”(P.133)

Proust is obviously exploring the power of memory in relation to the problem of which memories can become available to consciousness, and which cannot . The physical image Ricoeur uses to elaborate upon this theme is that of the archipelago—a group of separated islands symbolising incommunicability. This, of course, in turn is an effective symbol of the difficult quest for truth in relation to the past:

“One must give up the attempt to relive the past if lost time is ever, in some as yet unknown way, to be found again.”(P.141)

This must invoke a remembrance of Freud’s work in which what was once “lost” to the unconscious realm of our existence, is recovered by the special techniques of psychoanalysis. The realm of knowledge here, however, is not that of the past of the historian, but rather that of the the realm of self knowledge, so valued by the Delphic oracle and serious writers.

Ricoeur claims that a death of desire is involved in this process: a death that must have wider consequences. Only the revelations of art can prevent the more extreme consequences of the death of desire, which presumably also entails a dimming of the light of consciousness for those phenomenologically-inclined investigators. Literature, Ricoeur argues, is ” a rediscovery of the real”(P.151). In spite of this, however, Ricoeur notes that life is a work destroyed by death(P.152). This accords with the Freudian view that the artists work is not fuelled solely by conscious memory, but also by the power of the defence mechanism of sublimation. Sublimation, was as we know, defined by Freud as a nonsexual form of substitute satisfaction, and it was a form or vicissitude of the life-instinct that makes a compromise with the death instinct in the wake of the suffering of the artist. This kind of compromise, nevertheless aims at happiness, and an expanded enjoyment of life that opens a window onto the world. For Kant, this artistic endeavour appeals to the appreciator, and encourages a response in which both the imagination and understanding are involved in the production of a pleasure related to that which we experience when we learn something. Perhaps we learn that memory has lost contact with some regions of our past, and that therefore sublimation is needed as a substitute form of satisfaction in which learning about oneself is a necessary precondition for opening the window onto the world. Once “past things” are restored, perhaps a firmer grasp on reality supervenes.

The above digression via Freud and Kant would, needless to say, by rejected by Ricoeur on the grounds of a rejection of their rationalistic views of understanding and reasoning: views that rely on principles(arché) and laws. Aristotle, Kant, and Freud all believed in the explanatory power of the categories of the understanding and the principles of knowledge and they would not have shied away from any of the metaphysical implications flowing from such a belief.

Ricoeur concludes Volume Two with some reflections upon his use of the term “narrative”. He asks himself whether he has illegitimately confined his remarks to the diegetic mode of the novel, to the exclusion of the dramatic mode of mimetic representation. In defence of his account, he points to the fact that both muthos and action have the same “scope”. He notes, in connection with this that the idea of plot seems to cover the activity of both Homer and Sophocles. The problem, put simply, is that in identifying these two modes in terms of “Points of view” and “voice”, which Ricoeur admits has not been proven to be present in dramatic works, the real philosophical issues become marginalised. His dialectical reflections lead him to wonder whether in fact the novel is an “antigenre genre”(P.154). It ought also to be pointed out that Ricoeur does not identify the novel with the classical format of “epic”. Epic narrative consequently becomes a problem because , as he claims, it appears to create a “distance” between the author and the public, which he wishes would disappear. Historically, critics like Goethe and Schiller, divide literature into the categories of epic, drama and lyric. Part of Ricoeur’s problem in achieving clarity over these issues, is that he does not provide us with a clear account of the relation between the world of the text and the life world. This problem , Ricoeur claims can only be addressed when:

“The world of the text is confronted with the world of the reader.”(P.160)

This is not an epistemological issue but requires arguments with ontological commitment. Yet Ricoeur persists in claiming that what we are dealing with here is the issue of “reference” or “referential intentions”(P.160). He uses this term which is a part of the analytical apparatus of Sense and Reference, that has its origins in the work of Frege. This combined with a commitment to the “descriptive theory” of Husserlian phenomenology, helps to create the conceptual framework which resulted in an analytically inspired solipsism that is the theoretical inspiration to the concept of “point of view” and “voice”. Neither of these concepts can easily be used in the context of explanation/justification, or indeed, in any context where principles and laws are used rationally and universally. The question remains as to whether a “voice”(incapable of understanding universal or general conceptual truths), is capable of communication at all. Kant taught us that intuitions without concepts are blind, and that consequently even the simple act of pointing out what one refers to, probably also requires a conceptual framework connected to categories and principles. Wittgenstein taught us that Names do not constitute a language, but rather presuppose a language-framework. A language is certainly required to constitute a linguistically structured point of view. A window that opens out onto the world is also more than a “point of view”, yet it is a good metaphor for the relation between the “point” that is looking out the window onto a world that is so much more than an analytical collection(sum of the parts) or totality of states of affairs that can be pointed to.

Aletheia is the term Heidegger would prefer to use in the context of this kind of discussion, and it has the advantage of emphasising the moment of unconcealment or revelation that occurs in the “window onto the world” metaphor. The window becomes a symbol of the conceptual framework needed for revelation of the truth to occur. Aletheia can occur in many different ways including narrative accounts of History as well as the fictional narrative accounts of characters exploring their memories.

August 2, 2022October 11, 2022

Review of Ricouer’s Volume 2 “Time and Narrative”: Essay 9 Games with Time.

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Ricoeur, in the spirit of analytical Philosophy, wishes to split narrative structure into two dialectical components of utterance and statement. This is a surprising move, considering his commitment to Heideggerian Phenomenological existentialism, but it does link up to some elements of Heideggerian reflections upon assertion and interpretation, which also manifests “analytical” tendencies, e.g.:

“The primary significance of assertion is “pointing out”(Heidegger Being and Time: 154)

” “Assertion” means no less than “predication”. We assert” a “predicate ” of a “subject” and the “subject” is given a definite character”(Heidegger : 155)

” “Assertion” means “communication”……letting someone see with us what we have pointed out by way of giving it a definite character….that which is “shared” is our Being-towards what has been pointed out.”(155)

This contrasts with the Kantian view of a judgement which, when it discusses predication, speaks of the about-ness relation rather than the fact that the subject is given a definite character. In Kant, the “pointing out” of the “subject”, is also omitted, and this might be because of an unwillingness to equate the logic of conceptualisation with the possible way in which we learn some concepts in relation to the identification of a subject. The third quote, in the above series, indicates a fundamental difference between Heideggerian hermenutical-existentialism and an analytical Philosophy inspired by St Augustines theory of language, names, and ostensive definition. In this quote Heidegger, for example, speaks about “Being”, which is revealed to us in far more complex ways than the mere act of “pointing out”. “Assertion” for Heidegger is also a more complex matter than merely communicating a fact about an object or state of affairs. The key term for Heidegger is “judgement” as a mode of interpretation of Being: judgement is a mode of Being-in-the-world. For example, in the judgement “The hammer is too heavy” there is of course a prior ready-to-hand relation to the hammer, which is part of the content of the judgement, as is the intention to say something about the hammer that one wishes to replace. The hammer, as a consequence of this judgement, becomes something present-at-hand and it is at this stage of the proceedings, Heidegger argues, that properties emerge. When this happens we have abstracted from a totality of involvements, and the whole experience “dwindles” to the mere seeing of what is present-at-hand. This account of what is present-at-hand is to be compared with the account of the ready-to-hand which is presented and interpreted in more positive existential-hermeneutic terms(Heidegger: 158). What is being described here, is a contrast between an abstract theoretical assertion, and a concrete existential assertion. It is clear from this that the abstract “logic” of assertion is, from an ontological point of view, inadequate:–hence the term “dwindles”.

Language, for Heidegger, contains assertions but is to be conceived more broadly as “discourse” or “talk”:

“Discourse is existentially equi-primordial with state of mind and understanding”(160)

Discourse, then, is the logos of interpretation and assertion, and can be characterised in terms of a “totality of significations”, expressing our Dasein(Being-there) in relation to Being-in-the-world. Discourse is also particularly focussed upon our “Being-with-one-another”(161), whose ultimate aim is not merely to say something about something but rather:

“discourse helps to constitute the disclosedness of Being-in-the-world”(162)

State of mind and understanding are also disclosed in discourse, along with other “existential characteristics”(162) that make language as a phenomenon possible.

Heidegger claims, questionably, that in ancient Greece, Logos is equated with “assertion” and present-at-hand properties. This would not be true for either Heraclitus, for whom logos was connected with the ontological basis for identifying one thing to be logically identical to another, e.g. the road up and the road down are the same, or for Aristotle(the inventor of logic), for whom the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason were constitutive of the logos of a phenomenon such as assertion.

Heidegger, in fact discusses Aristotle’s essence-specifying definition of man, namely “rational animal”, and claims that this definition disguises the existential characteristic of man, namely discourse. Aristotle, however, specifically amends this to “rational animal capable of discourse ” in a definition in a later work, where he specifically relates this definition to his hylomorphic framework. This framework refers to the importance of principles(arché), and a manifold of potentialities(powers), that can be actualised as part of the “logos” of being human. Logic, therefore, for Aristotle, was never a technical (techné) device designed for the purpose of analysing what Heidegger referred to as present-at-hand properties, but rather a rational activity very much connected to the ideas of arché, areté, and epsitemé. Aristotle was committed via the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason to an idea of truth resembling aletheia( unconcealment of Being), and for Aristotle, such a disclosure of Being could occur in many ways(the many meanings of being) connected to different human potentialities(powers).

Heidegger claims that it is not just what is ready-to-hand and its circumspect form of concern, that is juxtaposed to what is present at hand, but also a form of concern he calls Care, that manifests itself partly in our concern for others. He calls this form of concern solicitude, probably because it occurs in an existential context of the Anxiety every human feels at the prospect of being thrown into the world. This is not to be confused with the fear we feel at the presence of particular objects or events that occur in the world. This anxiety is related to the future orientation of Dasein which is expressed thus:

Dasein is an entity for which in its Being, that Being is an issue.”(191)

This is also an important part of the temporality of Dasein. One of the consequences of, firstly, experiencing existential anxiety in the face of Being-in-the-world, and secondly, Dasein being an issue for itself , is a “being-towards death”, which can take authentic and inauthentic forms. This is a mode of being in which there are no longer any possible ways to be-there. In this final state of our Being, we are transformed into an entity present-at-hand. Everyone, in virtue of the fact that they are a form of life(psuche), must universally and necessarily end in this state(die), but nevertheless this is my fate to experience, and is to that extent singular and individual. Death is the last event on the journey of actualising my possibilities. At one point in Being and Time, Heidegger acknowledges that Dasein is life(psuche)(246,) and this merely raises once more the questionable relation of his work to hylomorphism and its commitment to knowing psuche(forms of life).

The problem of the ontological characterisation of fictive discourse is not discussed in the above Heideggerian terms ,but rather, curiously, in the analytical terms of the self-reference of a grammatical sentence which takes the form of an assertion. The fictive text, Ricouer argues, presents itself in present tense grammatical form, yet at the same time unrelated to the real presence normally implied by assertion. Ricoeur in the context of this discussion curiously claims:

“preterite loses its grammatical function of designating the past”(P.65)

and he elaborates upon this line of argument in the following manner:

“we have the right to speak of the absence of temporality in fiction”(P.65)

This, of course does not follow at all on any reasonable principle.

Ricoeur claims that the respective discourses of the narrator and the characters of the plot, are dialectically related. There is, however, no doubt that, in fictional narrative, the narrator is narrating in the past tense, but this is obscured by Ricoeur’s claim that:

“it is not the past as such that us expressed by the past tense but the attitude of relaxation, of uninvolvement”P.69)

An alternative explanation for the impression Ricoeur is attempting to describe above, is that what we are dealing with in relation to the narrator speaking in the third person, is psychically distanced from the characters being spoken about, in much the same way the historian is, when describing the events that are historically important: indicating not uninvolvement but rather a kind of objective involvement that one is prepared to defend with objective argumentation if called upon to do so. There does not appear to be any disruption of the tense system of language, as Ricoeur suggests(P.72). The time of fiction must have a natural and not an artificial constructed relation to both the tense systems of language and “lived time”. Designating what fiction is about as the “quasi-past”, is a problematic implication of the preceding reasoning. Ricoeur’s reasoning shares much with the epistemological concerns of analytical philosophers over our relation to reality via our descriptive discourse. Heidegger’s more existential and holistic relation to the function of discourse in all its forms in our lives, is discarded in the above reasoning. The outline of a Heideggerian solution to the problem of the philosophical nature of fictive discourse lies in Ricoeur’s claim that the fictional text has the power to “project a world”. Unfortunately, for him, the key to understanding what is involved in this projective power, is the power of the imagination. Furthermore this power is conceived of in the spirit of “everything is possible” rather than in terms of the Heideggerian account of Dasein, and its power of understanding possible forms of life, and ways to be. This latter is obviously a conceptual power determined by categories of judgement which determine the “form” of life-related judgements. The imagination obviously, according to Kant, provides schemata for these concepts, but it is the “I think” that is the primary power which organises the imaginative content. “Projection” therefore, is an unfortunate choice of term and perhaps the term “conceptualise” would have been more appropriate.

Ricoeur explores, in the context of the above discussion, the differences between the time of narration, and narrated time, and claims that what we are witnessing is a “game” with time in which the quantities of the time of narration:

“agree with the qualities of time belonging to life itself.”(P.80)

The rules of the game indicate a discontinuous structure, Ricoeur argues, manifesting a dangerous adventurous conceptualisation, whereas a more linear continuous structure designate themes of growth and the actualisation of potentialities. Portraying these “forms” in terms of the idea of a “game” thus allows Ricoeur to claim that changes can be made to the rules of the game: changes which allow radical experiments which may even radically:

“shatter the very experience of time”(P.81)

In such “experiments”, the voice of the narrator is given peculiar qualities which may not be easy to describe, using our rational categories of evaluation. Ricoeur fixates upon the term “point of view” , which, as “modernism” has “matured” has modified and attenuated its meaning, to such an extent, that it can tolerate the possibility of describing it in terms of the “shattering” of the temporal structures of our experience. Ricoeur invokes Aristotle’s central and controlling concept of “character”, and its intimate relation to action and thought. For Aristotle these three organising features of mimetic narration, together constitute the represented basis for the organising of time in what is narrated. This is done in such a way that there is a commonality of structure between this narrated time and the lived time of our experiences.

Ricoeur discusses Käte Hamburger’s claim that it is third person narration that is best able to represent the above structure, which also enables the narration to proceed in the spirit of “know thyself”, a spirit Ricoeur prefers to characterise in terms of :

“the inspection of what goes on inside minds”(P.89)

This form of characterisation, may, however, be an unnecessary interiorisation of what is primarily the thought of an active agent engaged in external action. The voice of a narrator is sometimes characterised in terms of omniscience, but this may be an overreaction to the universal and necessary quality of the voice that may be commenting on ethical matters in accordance with the telos of a plot. The term “point of view” has come to suggest a relativisation of values, which does not easily integrate itself with a universal voce pronouncing over the possibility of necessities. The Wittgensteinian concept “world-view” perhaps escapes this kind of integration problem. Ricoeur concludes with the claim:

“On the whole the two notion of point of view and voice are so inseparable that they become indistinguishable.”(P.99)

The notion of “point of view” obviously shifts the ground of inquiry from the question “What is being said?”, to the question “Who is speaking?”, and this shift tends to marginalise the world that is being conceptualised, The focus is then on the source of conceptualisation which is actually just one technical aspect of fictional narration.

July 28, 2022October 11, 2022

Essay 8 Review of Ricoeur’s “Time and Narrative”: Linguistics and analytical structuralism

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Ricoeur believes that the science of linguistics is deductively structured, and he is, moreover, prepared to use it as a model to analyse the language-forms of a plethora of narrative types which he otherwise claims is so varied that it would be an impossible task for induction to arrive at any explanatory results. He quotes Saussure and his distinction between the code of language, which is systematic, and the message of language, which is diachronically historical. The limitation of such an approach is, of course, that the sentence is the primary object of analysis, and larger units such as “texts” are composed of the “atoms” of these sentences and subjected to a structural analysis.

Ricoeur quotes Roland Barthes on the topic of the so-called organic whole of the literary text, but this account relies on a transactional relation between a sender and a hearer which materialises the “message” to such an extent, that it is no longer recognised to be something that is “understood”. Ricoeur also, in the context of this discussion, recommends detaching nomological considerations from contexts of understanding, on the grounds that there is no identity relation existing between them.

The strategy of Saussure’s linguistic theory is to some extent shared by Ricoeur, and involves the marginalisation of diachronical historical concerns, in favour of a synchrony of structure, but this in this turn involves a failure to acknowledge the extent to which History, in fact, favours synchrony of structure. On such an account of History, historical diachrony is explained, justified and understood in terms of operative principles and laws. Ricoeur, in the course of this discussion, suddenly sees the need for some kind of rational structure and invokes the “atomistic” science of linguistics, rather than the more molecular approach we find in historical reasoning.

Structuralism also has a tendency to invoke abstractions which are ethically neutral, e.g. “functions” which are means-ends variables, that tend to divide the whole significance of action into “action segments” manifesting different instrumental concerns. Ricoeur refers to Propp’s “Morphology of the Folk-Tale”:

“Propp’s morphology is essentially characterised by the primacy it gives to functions over characters. By a “function” he means segments of action, or more exactly, abstract forms of action such as abstention, interdiction, violation, reconnaisance, delivery, trickery, and complicity.”(P.33)

The actions listed, are actions that are attributable to an agent or character, and it is clear that Propp is attempting to transfigure an essentially cultural object, into a scientific object(P.38) The science of preference that is invoked by Ricoeur, in support of this position, is Sociology, and it is then suggested with reference to the work of Claude Brenaud(Logique du récit), that characters ought to be transformed into roles, and a list or principal narrative roles should be drawn up(P.40) It is then suggested that roles ought to be inserted into a ” field of evaluations”(P.41). Ricoeur then claims, paradoxically:

“a logic of possible narrative acts is still only a logic of action”(P.43)

It is the task of the plot, it is argued, to transform action into narrative. What is missing from this account, however, is the extent to which the principles that are operating in the process of plot-construction, are essence-specifying(ethically speaking) with a teleological emphasis that prioritises ends, and the power the end has of conferring meaning on the beginning and middle segments of the narrative. The reader is led from the beginning to the end of the narrative, and they are encouraged to think in a context of exploration/discovery. The creator’s perspective, however, is embedded in a context of explanation/justification which begins at the level of the essence-specifying principles and the teleological “end” of the narrative.

Seeking for rationality via an exercise of dialectical logic that attempts to synthesise two activities abstracted from very different kinds of context, is not a useful exercise seen from the context of explanation/justification. Both hylomorphic and critical Philosophy, see a fundamental logical difference between propositions referring to activities and these logically distinguishable types of context. Principles regulating an inductive exploration on the part of the audience and principles regulating the creation of the narrative, however, can be shared, on the condition that ,the context of explanation/justification is primary: but this is clearly not the position Ricoeur occupies.

Todorof does not speak of principles, but of ” a synthesis of the roles of a plot”(The Grammar of Narrative) and Ricoeur criticises this position thus:

“to know all the roles–is not yet to know any plot whatsoever.”(P.43)

Mink is also referred to, and he takes us further up the ladder of rationalist abstraction with talk of an “act of judgement”, which, it is claimed, relates to the praxis of narrative. Ricoeur neutralises the rationalist implications of this appeal, by claiming that this act of judgement has little to do with what he characterises as the “logic of the narrative”.

St Augustine’s view of time is preferred to that of Aristotle’s, perhaps because of the metaphysical implications of the Aristotelian account, and perhaps also because of a prior commitment to Structuralism, which lies behind the doubt about the relation between the logic or rationality of the narrative and our understanding of narrative. Add to this the wish to locate this debate in the transactional circumstances of sender and receiver, and we have marginalised the context of explanation/justification, in favour of the context of exploration/discovery. Of course, it is always an empirical possibility that the receiver of a message will not understand the intent of the message(e.g. that X was an evil tyrant). The creator of the message, however, assumes that the message is sufficiently universal to reasonably expect that the message will be understood as intended.

Ricoeur’s transactional commitment rests partly upon an interest in Danto’s theory of action and narrative sentences:

“This structure of sentences that describe action has been the object of much detailed work in analytic Philosophy……One noteworthy characteristic of these sentences is that they involve an open-ended structure running from “Socrates says….” to “Brutus killed Caesar on the Ides of March in the Roman Senate with a knife….” It is this semantics of action that, in fact, is presupposed in the theory of the narrative sentence.”(P.57)

This reliance on the intentional logic of the analytical Philosopher, for whom the world is essentially a totality of facts, and scientific investigation proceeds principally in the context of exploration/discovery is, to say the least, surprising. Given the commitments to Husserl and Heidegger, reference to an essentially descriptive position embedded in a methodologically oriented science in which variables are manipulated and measured in accordance with hypotheticals, is problematic, given that narrative is essentially and imperative-driven enterprise. Action-sentences that are open-ended(without clear intent?), are sentences that do not belong within the domain of the tribunal of explanation/justification. Very General Open-sentences are by definition strategically ambiguous, and subject to a logic of probability, which most creators of narratives would seek to avoid. The ethical imperative that is operative in narrative works, is not hypothetical or instrumental, but rather, subject to a necessity that must be categorical in nature. The ethical message must be universal and necessary, and not subject to strategic ambiguity.

It is true that the creator of a work of art must also produce a unique object, but this does not involve introducing ambiguity into the ethical message, by varying the essential nature of the message. The uniqueness condition in such circumstances has more to do with varying the way in which the message is presented. If one chooses to invert the ethical image and “per impossibile”, in Aristotles terms, “aim at the Bad”, rather than the Good, the result might well be shocking and raise questions as to whether one is any longer dealing with a “work” of Art.

July 26, 2022October 11, 2022

Review of Vol 2 of Ricoeur’s “Time and Narrative”: The fate of narrative.

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Ricoeur’s hermeneutical approach to Philosophy acknowledges a debt to Heidegger which, in turn, engages in a form of metaphysical and transcendental speculation about the power of the imagination that would have been rejected by both Aristotle and Kant. Kant is criticised by Heidegger for failing to recognise the scope of the power of the imagination, and this is linked to a “forgetfulness-of-Being”- thesis proposed by Heidegger, as one of the foundation stones of his phenomenological-existential approach to articulating the relation of Dasein(Being-there) to Being-in-the-world. Ricoeur believed that Heidegger’s philosophical results were essentially sound, but the route he took to arrive at them,were short-cuts, and therefore not ultimately satisfactory from his phenomenological/hermeneutic point of view. Ricoeur preferred the Cartesian inspired phenomenological route, outlined by Husserl, that proceeded via the description of objects of experience which relied on the use of a method that put the world in brackets(whatever that means). Language was also a focus of concern for Ricoeur, and he chose to focus on the idea of “meaning”, rather than “truth” which, he claimed, better articulated our relation to a life-world that , for him, seemed to require “interpretation” rather than articulation in terms of the principles of reasoning and the categories of the understanding(so important for knowledge). For Husserl, the “knowledge” that the sciences claimed to possess or discover, was “putative”, and largely a consequence of what he referred to as a “crisis” that manifested itself in the Western sciences in general.

Ricoeur discusses briefly the history of the term “plot” in the opening chapter of this work, and notes that, during the time of Aristotle, the focus of attention was upon tragedy, comedy, and the epic forms of narrative. He cites the relatively modern emergence of the novel, and characterises this phenomenon in terms of “convention-busting” (a laboratory for experimentation). In this experiment, he maintains, we may have witnessed the disappearance of the concept of “plot” from the “horizon of literature”(P.7) In volume one, it was claimed that it was the disappearance of the plot paradigm that was the primary reason for the choice of the term “quasi-plot”, which was also accompanied by the curious term “quasi-character” in Historical forms of narrative. In all these forms of narrative, there is a clear and distinct retreat from the paradigms of argument, to the “forms” of “analogy” and “interpretation”. The term “quasi-plot” was, of course, an attempt to generalise the concept of plot, so that the term could still be applied to, amongst other things, the modern novel. In this situation, the imagination was clearly conceived by Ricoeur to be the organising power in relation to the consciousness of the characters of the plot. For Aristotle, on the contrary, the plot was the “form” which organised the “matter” of the action and thoughts of the character, and Language was merely the “medium” for the messages of the work. Language, for Aristotle, as was the case for Kant, could be used irrationally to produce both false and meaningless statements as well as rationally ( to produce true and universally necessary statements). Insofar as language was being used intentionally by the author to create a narrative with a meaning that may largely be generated in the imperative mode, because it is being focussed on the Good rather than the True, there is no necessity to argue that because the statements are not strictly true, they do not possess a mode of objectivity. It would not be correct to say, that the statements the author produces, are false, because they are not aiming at what is the case, but rather at what ought to be the case.

There are, in fact, alternative explanations (to the one provided by Ricoeur) for the emergence of the modern novel that has, according to Ricoeur, loosened its ties to the notion of “plot”, and strengthened its ties to a modern notion of “character”. “Modern” representation of character, is often in accordance with modern personality theory, which in turn is the result of the “separation” of Psychology from Philosophy in the 1870’s( in the name of “Science”). The multi-faceted representation of a “person”, that we found in the writings of Aristotle and Kant, were largely jettisoned in the divorce between Psychology and Philosophy, with the exception of the work of Freud. Practical understanding and reasoning, connected to the ethical dimension of character, were ruled out as “subjective”, in accordance with materialistic and dualistic theories that had earlier been neutralised by Aristotelian and Kantian arguments. “Raw behaviour” and sensation-like forms of consciousness became the “atoms” of a theoretical approach, that phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty criticised in his work “Phenomenology of Perception”. Yet even in this work we saw an attachment to Cartesianism, and a criticism of science which construed it as some form of second-order account of reality, in comparison with the first order description of our activity in the life-world. Both the categories of the understanding, and the principles of reasoning, were marginalised in favour of more sensible aspects of the powers of our mind. This, together with a materialistic commitment on the part of science, resulted in methodologically committed observers, devoted to the manipulation and measurement of independent and dependent variables. Both Logical positivism and logical atomism, and their commitment to methodology, combined to promote observation and criticise introspection( as a method of producing data for manipulation and measurement). Many modern personality theories confined themselves to sensible and behavioural powers, and avoided what they regarded as “speculation” upon those higher cognitive powers and processes, so necessary for being a person in our complex cognitively constructed worlds(e.g. understanding and reason). It is obvious that, from a hylomorphic and critical point of view, both understanding and reasoning have been parsed away in the processes of scientific and phenomenological reductions. An endless journey on the path of exploration/discovery is preferred, to sitting in the auditorium in which phenomena are submitted to the tribunal of explanation/justification.

With reference to the reflection above, we can maintain that there are at least two other explanations for the phenomenon of modern art in general, and the modern novel in particular. Firstly, one of the reasons the journey on the path of exploration is necessary, is because the task of the sojourner appears to be that of discovering something new and unique. What is often not taken into account, is that the medium, for example, of narrating the lives of characters embedded in their life-worlds, is a finite medium: i.e. at some point there will be nothing new to discover because the medium is exhausted. This may have happened in the eight-tone based classical music, whose disappearance gave rise to the twelve tone atonal modern music, and other modern art exhibitions such as Cage’s 4 minute 33 second silence. Whether modern novelists felt this way about their creations becomes, in the light of the above, an open question. This is one possible explanation for the phenomenon Ricoeur refers to. Another possible explanation is connected to Heidegger’s thesis of the “forgetfulness of Being”. Now, we do not accept that preferring to focus on the sensible power of the imagination, (at the expense of the higher cognitive powers of understanding and reason), is “remembering” something that has been forgotten, because this, in our view ,is merely an extension of the modern rejection of the work of Aristotle by the “new men”(Descartes, Hobbes, Hume), which continued with the rejection of Kantian critical theory by Hegel, and a scientific movement, that eventually culminated in logical positivist and logical atomist theory where the world was “reduced” to a totality of facts. Our argument is that ,if we refuse to discard our powers of understanding and reason, narrative retains the possibility of being imperative-driven, and motivated by the Aristotelian “aim at The Good”, and its ought system of concepts. On this kind of account, the idea of “plot” too, is salvaged, and the claim is that it is driven by principles that are teleological and essence-specifying. This kind of account also manifests a refusal to situate this discussion in a context of exploration and discovery, and an insistence to remain in the auditorium in which the tribunal of explanation/justification is taking place. Hannah Arendt’s references to the role of the “new men”, for whom “everything was possible”,(including the colonisation of the planets for profit) and the rest of us for whom, as a consequence, “nothing was possible” anymore , gives this whole discussion a political dimension and suggests that the “phenomenon of the modern had totalitarian aspects. Since the occurrence of two world wars and the dropping of two atomic bombs on civilian populations in what Arendt called the “terrible 20th century, in every age and every generation there is no absence of evidence that we are still in the grip of the “philosophy” of these “new men”.

Ricoeur summarises his position in relation to the modern novel in the following manner:

“It is within the realm of the modern novel that the pertinence of the concept of emplotment seems to have been contested the most. The modern novel, indeed, has, since its creation, presented itself as the protean genre par excellence. Called upon to respond to a new and rapidly changing social situation, it soon escaped the paralysing control of critics and censors. Indeed, it has constituted for at least three centuries now a prodigious workshop for experiments in the domains of composition and the expression of time.”(P.8)

Ricoeur cites Virginia Woolf and what he describes as a stream-of-consciousness methodology, claiming that the primary issues for here were:

“the incompleteness of personality, the diversity of the levels of consciousness, the subconscious, the unconscious, the stirring of unformulated desires, the inchoative and evanescent character of feelings”( P.10)

The above description of Woolf’s work, however, appears to be sufficiently multifaceted to manifest the more classical concerns about narrative, which stretch well beyond the imagination, and our impulsive emotional life. Desire, for example, for Aristotle, included the desire men have to know. The unconscious, as described and explained by Freud, also was embedded in a system of principles(the energy regulation principle, the pleasure-pain principle, and the reality principle), that required both understanding and reason to comprehend. Freud’s principle-based personality theory, inspired by Kant, was a very different kind of theory to the “new” variable-based trait theories, searching for correlations instead of causality.

Ricoeur also discusses the modern attempts to create a “new” genre, in which exact correspondences between reality and the world of the literary work, was the aim—the kind of resemblance that memory had, to what it remembered, appeared to be the focus of attention in some attempts. Now, whilst the power of memory is related to many other powers(e.g. semantic memory), it is its relation to sensory circumstances that appear in these attempts to be most important for Ricoeur. The question also arises in relation to this venture: how complex is the reality that one is attempting to duplicate or imitate. If, for example it includes actions of magnitude which aim to restore order in a chaotic world, in accordance with ethical principles, e.g., the defeat of Richard III, then there does not seem to be much substance in Ricoeur’s criticism.

There is an awareness in the writings of Ricoeur, of the modern malaise, our modern discontentment that so often focuses upon our civilisations. It surfaces in the following:

“Today it is said that only a novel without plot or characters or any discernible temporal organisation is more genuinely faithful to experience, which is itself fragmented and inconsistent, than was the traditional novel of the 19th century”(P.13)

He poses the curious question of whether the modern style of narrating includes within itself the possibility of “dying out”(P.20), and he appears to think that an affirmative answer to this question is conceivable, pointing to the example of the deliberate choice of an author not to provide an ending to their work. If action, as a matter of fact, possessed merely an episodic character, this would suggest an attempt to imitate an action without any vision of its end, and perhaps also without any vision of the more distant goods it may bring about. Action, in reality, in contrast to the fragmented experience referred to by Ricoeur above, is embedded in an ought-structure, in which the imperative mood prevails. Heidegger draws attention to inauthentic forms of action connected to the failure by “They” to acknowledge the “good” associated with death(e.g. as manifested by Socrates in the face of his own imminent death.). Inauthentic forms of action are, of course, pathological and defensive, even if the imagination, fuelled by fear, is one of the sources for the denial of the meaning of death.

Ricouer makes an interesting detour in his account, and ventures into the realm of religious writings in the Bible, which contains both a mythic-historical account of Genesis, and a vision of an Apocalypse that necessitates the wish for salvation and a life after death. Ricoeur realises that this biblical representation is comprehensible, only under the condition that the narrative form has not died out:

“For we have no idea of what a culture would be where no one any longer knew what it meant to narrate things.”(P.28)

Historical narratives also require an understanding in terms of categories and principles and they too must aim at “The Good” in a context of explanation/justification.

July 22, 2022October 11, 2022

Review of Ricoeur’s “Time and Narrative” Essay 6 Historical intentionality

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Aristotle claimed that we are so constituted in terms of the power of our mind, that the question “What happened?”, is not merely asking for the facts of the matter ,but immediately poses another question, namely, “Why did it happen?” The “Why? question is not a fact-seeking question, but rather a principle-seeking question, and these principles in turn can be related to a number of different kinds of explanations(aitia). Men desire to know, Aristotle argued in his “Metaphysics”, and the invention of History is partly a response to this desire: a response which provides us with the answers to the questions “What happened?” and “Why did it happen?”. History, in a sense, is a tran-scientific discipline in which we are provided both with the facts, and also indirectly a practical knowledge of what ought or ought not to be done(areté).

The activities of man stretch over many domains, meeting both the concrete and abstract needs necessary to provide him with the life he believes he ought to lead: a good spirited, flourishing life(eudaimonia). We should recall here, the words of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, namely, that all activities of man aim at the Good. Wars(both foreign and internecine) disrupt the pattern of mans life at all levels, threatening the possibility of meeting both his concrete and abstract needs, and perhaps there is no greater need than the need to study a subject which documents the occurrence of wars, and the ways in which they are avoided and come to an end. This study has not, thus far, had much effect in the prevention of conflicts, in spite of the empirical evidence(facts) of the destruction they bring. Add to this evidence, the rational argument that wars are practical self-contradictions(massive loss of life to prevent massive loss of life), and one can indeed wonder whether the Delphic oracle’s prophecies relating to “Knowing thyself” and “Everything created by man is destined for ruin and destruction” are not moral, but rather empirical warnings, relating to the importance of knowledge in all mans activities.

The question to raise, given our knowledge of History is, considering the thousands of years of wars man has experienced, whether knowledge of the facts, and knowledge of what we ought to do, is sufficient for man to begin living in the “perpetual peace” Kant imagined and hoped for, when mans rational powers mature and his activities become fully rational. Until this “telos”actualises itself, man must perhaps count himself among the Freudian discontents, insofar as his relation to our civilising activities are concerned. Both History and Philosophy, are obviously, two disciplined approaches to The Good, but their approaches differ, and the way in which they do may be instructive to explore in future writings. The History of Philosophy and the Philosophy of History would seem, then, to be a necessary aspect of Sophia—the wisdom we need to answer the aporetic questions thrown up by the human powers of mind we possess.

The rationalism of both Hylomorphic and Critical Philosophy insist that explanation/justification and theoretical and practical understanding are important moments involved in the contextualisation of facts, which are of course, spatio-temporal entities embedded in our experience. The question “What happened?”, implies the question “What happened, when, and where?” If, to take a historical example, the facts support the generalisation that the key sphere of influence upon the world has shifted from the Mediterranean to the North Atlantic, one cannot avoid posing and attempting to answer the question “Why?” In the answer, we can expect to find references to knowledge(epistemé) justice(diké) well-judged activity(areté) and a grasp of fundamental principles of both theoretical and practical activity(arché), especially insofar as we encounter these elements in the contexts of power and influence.

Shifting spheres of influence are part of the Transcendental Aesthetic of History. Yet even here, the focus is on the quality of the civilisation-building activities that the Historian closely monitors in accordance with the Kantian question “What can we hope for?” This question, for Kant, is one of 4 questions which, for him, define the scope of Philosophy. Part of the answer Kant gives, is that we can hope for a global civilisation that not merely aims at the Good but has actualised it in most of its institutional structures. On such a world-view, The Good consists in men treating each other as ends in themselves, and not instrumentally as means to serve other arbitrary ends.

Another aspect of the Transcendental Aesthetic is the Historians penchant for categorising and charting the course of events during long periods of time, e.g. The Middle Ages. The Transcendental Aesthetic also engages with a Transcendental Analytic, and both together constitute a context of explanation/justification. Aspects of the Transcendental Analytic include the importance of knowledge in civilisation-building, the importance of justice, good judgement, connected to wise action, and respect for others. Historical reasoning primarily moves in this arena that is constituted by the context of explanation/justification. Long term processes(e.g. the globalisation process) which take, according to Kant, hundreds of thousands of years are subject to an underlying telos, e.g. Cosmopolitanism, operating in the Historians explanations and justifications.

Ricoeur discusses the removal of the explanatory element from the fabric of literary narratives, and to the extent that this means that the Historian emphasises the explanatory element, it is not at the expense of the description of the facts. In the example of the shift of power and influence from the Mediterranean, there would appear to be no problem with admitting that the Historian is using the facts to narrate the course of events that brought this shift about. The narrative obviously has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and there is also the presence of an underlying possibility of the working of a complex “story” of globalisation as it unfolds and moves toward the end of Cosmopolitanism. It is difficult to fathom exactly what Ricoeur means by the above claim that the Historians explanations/justifications are not part of the “fabric” of the narrative. They are certainly part of the assumptions that are operating in the production of historical documents and texts.

A Phenomenological discussion of the “objectivity” of History follows, and there is no mention of explanatory or justificatory principles/laws. The focus is, instead, upon the consequences of the operation of principles/laws: consequences such as the linking of facts together, and the completeness of explanations/justifications. Ricoeur claims, that it is the aim of historians to make their explanations/justifications “autonomous” and independent of the “self-explanatory” intent of the narrative. Ricoeur also points out that History concentrates its attention upon a different type of object, compared to that of the narrative. One is, he argues, no longer concerned with the attribution of responsibility to individuals, as a consequence of their actions, but rather the concern is with “nations” “societies”, “civilisations”, social classes”(p.177). The characters we encounter in narratives are replaced by more abstract entities(quasi-characters), and the assumption is made that the differences between characters, and these entities, are more important than their ethical identity. Socrates, for example, pointed out how all entities concerned with justice and the work of civilisation, ought to be considered in terms of the “soul writ large”, which would retain the identity of these entities with that of psuche. This would in turn indicate that agency, action, and the types of explanation/justification associated with them, are very relevant to both the description and explanation of these so-called more “abstract” entities. This, then, suggests that if the “covering law model” or the “covering principle model” applies to the narrative and plot involving characters, it ought also to apply to historical narratives. Ricoeur, as we have pointed out in previous essays, rejects this reasoning, and retreats to the vocabulary of “generalisations” and “warrants” of the kind that we find in the work of Gilbert Ryle in his work “The Concept of Mind”. “The term “plot” may, of course be the wrong term to apply to the teleological process of globalisation that leads to the end of Cosmopolitanism, suggesting as it does the negative ethical activity of “conspiracy”. We suggested the term “story” but “Telos” may, be a better technical term and also be more appropriate ethically.

Both fictional narrative and historical narrative, are capable of charting causation of different kinds and logically related explanations/justifications of different kinds. If this reflection is correct, then the application of the idea of a “story”, is common to both forms of narrative. The “story” of Globalisation, and its end Cosmopolitanism is, of course, a more abstract form of narrative, but it is considerably more than merely a “point of view” and can be regarded as an “account”.

The issue of historical intentionality is sketched in phenomenological terms that focus upon the “differences” between History and the other disciplines, rather than upon what these disciplines have in common. Husserl’s idea of a “life-world” has proven to be a useful concept in many contexts, and it has proven its value in combatting “analytical” views of action, which emphasise causality at the expense of the reason for action and its associated intention. The application of Husserl’s apparatus of phenomenology, and this technical term(life-world) becomes difficult in History because of Husserl’s Cartesian rejection of Aristotelian hylomorphism. Husserl’s pupil, Heidegger, however, has managed to provide us with an architectonic of concepts which are more applicable to the domain of historical activity. The concepts of Being-in-the-world , historicality, and Being-there(Dasein) can all be used to explain/justify what is going on in the world of History. Dasein, for example, understands itself in terms of its possibilities–its possible ways of Being-there. Living in perpetual peace in a Cosmopolitan world, is obviously something that is both ethically and politically desirable. Historicality is, to take another example, for Heidegger, an important aspect of the temporality of Dasein and this includes the “possibility” of making the past ones own, as Heidegger puts the matter. What he partly means by this, is that we have forgotten an important way of thinking about Being, in favour of a more inauthentic mode of thinking about our existence. This is certainly something Kant might have claimed in relation to our modern forgetfulness(beginning with Descartes and Hobbes) of the work of Aristotle, but Heidegger paradoxically, claims that both Aristotle and Kant are examples of Philosophers who have forgotten “the meaning of Being”. Both, on his view are rationalists, who have failed to appreciate the transcendental power of our imagination.

As far as Ricoeur is concerned, the plot of the narrative, is not the work of rationality and the faculty of reason, but rather the work of the faculty of Judgement operating in conjunction with the power of imagination, which somehow accounts for the connection of particular facts. There are, however, assumptions operating in the selection of the facts, characters, actions, and expressed thoughts of the narrative, and it is highly likely that not just judgements are involved, but also the categories of the understanding and the principles of reason. Ricoeur would deny this, and insist that it is the “point of view” of the narrator, that is determining the flow of the narrative. This “point of view” is composed of a number of elements which all combine to produce what Ricoeur calls an “explanatory effect”. He invokes Husserlian phenomenology, in connection with his judgement that the Sciences are all experiencing a crisis of legitimacy. The suggestion of genetic phenomenology is that the type of explanation one finds in science, differs significantly from the kind of understanding demanded by the narrative produced by a narrator. It is then, paradoxically suggested, that causality is the nexus of all explanation in History.(P.181) Ricoeur means here, that the type of causality we encounter, is dissociated from the teleological and formal forms of explanation discussed by Aristotle in his discussion of systems of knowledge and the logical structure that manifests itself in the essence-specifying attributes of universality and necessity. Neither Aristotle nor Kant would accept that a system of knowledge could be supported solely by the faculty of judgment, and a power of the imagination. Such a combination could not produce a system of knowledge that requires principles of logic as well as those principles we use to regulate our use of concepts, e.g. categories. On both Aristotelian and Kantian accounts, explanation and understanding are different aspects of the same knowledge-complex and not the bipolar opposites suggested by Ricoeur.

Ricoeur refuses to accept the validity of the essence-specifying attributes of universality and necessity, and prefers instead to talk in terms of structures, e.g. the structure of singular causal imputation. The sociological account of Weber is invoked to investigate the “logic” of singular causal imputation which:

“consists essentially of the constructing by our imagination of a different course of events, then of weighing the probable consequences of this unreal course of events, and finally in comparing these consequences with the real course of events.”(P.183 in Ricoeur)

Ricoeur chooses to illustrate this with the example of Bismark, and his decision to declare war on Austria-Hungary in 1866. Weber asks us to consider the hypothetical question of “What would have happened if he did not make this decision?” This question transports us into an unreal hypothetical world, in which the context of explanation/justification is replaced by a context of exploration/discovery. In this “investigation” the categorical and logical reasoning of Bismark, relating to reasons for actions and decisions are banished from the discussion, in favour of a form of reasoning about imagined particulars and the degree of probability of their consequences, insofar as these are capable of determination by a “calculating mind”. There is, it must be pointed out, a contradiction in this reasoning, since according to Bayes’ theorem, the degree of probability of an event can only be calculated if one has complete information about the event concerned,.e.g. there are 50 white balls and 50 black balls in the sack we are withdrawing our ball from. Bismark of course, did not have all the information necessary for making the right prediction of what would happen as a result of his decision, because his situation was not a “closed system,” like that of the sack containing a definite number of white and black balls. The type of “calculation” involved in Bismarks decision, can not contain any explanations or justifications, but only hypotheticals, arrived at inductively in the practical context of statecraft. This, of course, puts Bismark into a “relativist position”, connected to the “psychology of discovering hypotheses”(P.186). Neither Aristotle nor Kant would concede that what is going on in the Bismark case has anything to do with “knowledge”, i.e. justified true belief , best illustrated by the more modern terminology of a “nomological-deductive model”.

History was not a systematically organised discipline during the time of Aristotle who, as we know, saw no universality and necessity in a chain of singular judgements about past events. Insofar as there was no reference to formal and final aitia(causes, explanations), there could be no universal and necessary explanations/justifications. From a Kantian point of view, judgements receive their universality and necessity from both the categories that determine our judgements, and the principles of reasoning that serve to connect these judgements into nomological-deductive arguments. Reasons can be given for the shift of power and influence from the Mediterranean to the North Atlantic, and these will not be hypotheticals torn from the womb of imagining the unreal. Reasons can also be given for the conclusion that Bismark was either a good leader of Germany or not. All activities, Aristotle argued, aim at the Good. The possible exception in the Historical context is the decision to go to war ,which always brings ruin and destruction in its wake even if there are good instrumental reasons for the activity, e.g. stopping a tyrant from colonising a very large area of the world and, as a consequence, denying freedom to hundreds of millions of people. As a matter of fact, Bismarks decision can be evaluated from two different Kantian viewpoints: firstly from the instrumental civilisation-building perspective, where the outcome of the unification of Germany certainly provided Germany with considerable power and influence in the world well into the future. Secondly, in terms of his attachment to using war as a means to unify Germany, the failure to treat other states as ends in themselves is a contravention of the Kantian categorical imperative(second formulation). Aristotle too would have agreed that Bismark’s decisions were not for the sake of the principle of The Good. These two different judgements appear, at first sight, to be contradictory, but they are not so, because the principle of noncontradiction clearly qualifies itself with the words, “at the same time and in the same respect”. The positive judgement about Bismark is clearly a judgment that falls into the practical category of instrumental judgements and the negative judgement is a categorical ethical judgement.

Weber is again referred to in relation to the problem of causality and its consequence , determinism. The human decision can be situated in the context of causality or the context of freedom of choice. The idea of freedom is not completely detached from causality, because, on Kant’ theory, the free will causes itself to be active. Freedom, for Kant, is architectonic, i.e. an idea which orders the world in terms of ends, but it is also an idea that does not flow from experience. It is, rather, a principle which orders experience, by making our concepts, real or actual, in the world. According to Kant there is a detachment from the principle “Every event has a cause”, because this event of activity is self-causing. Also the relation of the act of will to an actual action, is not a causal one, where one can identify an independent cause and an independent effect. Bismarks decisions to go to war, can then be situated in a chain of causes situated in the “phenomenal world”(Kant), but they can also be situated in the noumenal world, in which, according to Kant, war may not be constitutional because it is not consistent with the ethical/political principle of bringing about the maximum freedom for everyone. This does not deny the fact that the eventual outcome for Germany was instrumentally useful in the future insofar as generating power and influence over its neighbours was concerned. The evaluation of Bismark’s legacy, which is the task of the Historian has, then, both instrumental and ethical components.

Weber’s claim that:

“causal analysis provides absolutely no value-judgement and a value judgement is absolutely not causal explanation.”(P.189 in Ricoeur)

needs further elaboration. Surely insofar as the concepts of power and influence are concerned, Bismarks legacy was obvious, and just as surely, in the noumenal world, there does not have to be a first cause or beginning of things: time is infinite and the causal chain will stretch into the past ad infinitum. In such a world a chain of causes can be begun by an act of will willing to make something happen in the world, and whilst this does not preclude situating this act in a causal chain, extending back into the past, neither does it preclude viewing this act of will as a first beginning of that chain, and thereby holding the agent concerned responsible for the consequences or ends of their action. Indeed, on the contrary, this self-causing of the chain is a condition of applying the concepts of responsibility and the associated praise or blame.

Ricoeur’s reasoning rests upon viewing individual decisions as singular events that cannot be generalised except in terms of “exemplary” necessity and “exemplary”universality(P.190). This reasoning confines us to charting the causal relation between, for example, the Protestant ethic and capitalism in terms of what Ricoeur calls” a singular causal chain”. Given the fact that ethical evaluations in their essence are universal, this approach eliminates them from the outset. Instead sociological generalisations are sought via the work of Weber, e.g. in terms of roles, attitudes and institutions which become the focus of attention(P.191). It is the Protestant “view of the world” rather than their ethical adherence to duty, that becomes the major issue. Predestination is obviously a critically important doctrine that testifies to the absence of one of the foundation stones of ethical theory, namely freedom. Predestination, Ricoeur argues:

“divests the individual f ultimate responsibility”(P.191)

Weber calls the rational ideas of God and freedom, “spiritual” ideas. Perhaps “responsibility” also falls into this category, which are set side in Ricoeur’s account, in favour of what he calls a “probability calculus”. This move reminds one of the consequentialist “hedonic calculus”, which rests upon an idea of “happiness” that Kant described as “the principle of self-love in disguise”. Neither happiness, nor the application of probability, to the events under consideration, can be connected to the kind of universality and necessity we encounter in contexts of explanation/justification related to reasoning ethically. Ricoeurs solution to the problems that emerge in his reflections, is to turn toward the concept of “plot”, and apply it in accordance with a concept of “analogy”, to the singular causal chain. The idea of “plot” becomes a carpetbag that holds the heterogeneous elements of “circumstances, intentions, interactions,, adversity, good or bad fortune”, together. Ricoeur then almost immediately modifies the term of “plot to “quasi-plot”, probably partly because of the difficulty of the possible connection of plot to ethical assumptions which do appeal to the characteristics of universality and necessity that are present in contexts of explanation/justification, and also present in Aristotle’s characterisation of tragic plots.

Historical knowledge, as we have pointed out is presented in Husserlian rather than Heideggerian terms, e.g. “noetic intention” is a favoured technical concept with its origins in genetic phenomenology(P.194). Ricoeur notes with approval Mandelbaum’s definition of society:

“individuals living in an organised community that controls a particular territory: the organisation of such a community is provided by institutions that serve to define the status occupied by different individuals, and ascribe to them the roles they are expected to play in perpetuating the continuing existence of the community.”(P.195 in Ricoeur)

This, according to Ricoeur, is:

“the ultimate reference of history”(P.195)

There is, also, reference once again to the singularity of societies–they are defined by their difference to one another, rather than in terms of their essential characteristics. It is, that is, the singular identity of a society , rather than the principles that constitute it, that become the primary issue for Ricoeur. The differences appealed to, are often empirical differences. Narratives, Ricoeur argues, allow us to portray singular individuals as characters, thereby conferring upon them a kind of exemplary universality that can be reconfigured into causes in historical accounts. The connection between cause and effect on this account is hypothetical:

“Causal necessity is therefore a conditional necessity: given the complex set of causal conditions that took place(and not others) it was necessary that the effect that was actually produced occur.”(P.201)

Part of this process involves a transition from the descriptive nature of facts in the historical account which are an attempt to answer the question “What happened?”, to the question “Why did it happen?”. Ricoeur believes in what he calls the “autonomy” of the Why-question from the What-question, because he rejects the “natural connection” proposed by Aristotle. This is partly because he demands a particular type of answer to the Why-question in terms of:

“factors, phases and structures”(P202)

This type of “analytical” approach dissolves the unity of the phenomenon being investigated which of, course, at some point, has to be “reconstructed” into a “structural unity”(P.202). Webers notion of ideal types is invoked in the ensuing discussion, which insists that the notion of a plot must have both singular characteristics and general typical characteristics. It must be acknowledged, that in certain types of historical explanation, e.g. the shift of power and influence from the Mediterranean region to the north Atlantic region, the idea of a “plot” structuring what is happening, may be strained, and not be an effective means of referring to the material and efficient causes that are operating in such Historícal changes in the world. Material causes, according to Aristotle will include such elements as the territory and character of the peoples, and the efficient causes will include the decisions made by the important figures of the time. So-called “final” causes or explanations of this regional shift of power, may well include the idea of the freedom of the peoples of the region, and also perhaps an awareness of the role of the democratisation of society. This latter aspect was of course in no small part formed by ancient Greek ideas of Justice and knowledge as well as the importance of the understanding of rational principles connected to these ideas.

There does not seem to be any difficulty with using the term “narrative” to describe what is happening historically in the cases of either Bismarks decision or the regional power shift. The term “plot” may be more appropriate, however, in the Bismark case, but it must be pointed out that this literary term does not always best capture the kind of universality and necessity we encounter in historical explanations. When the “message” of the narrative account is ethical then the term becomes more appropriate.

Ricoeur again discusses the notion of event, and is keen once again to seek differences. The event, he claims:

“distinguishes the historians concept of structure from that of the sociologist or economist.”(P.217)

The event, however, is not on this account, a universal concept, but rather a differentiating mechanism situated dissonantly in different time zones(P.217). Structures too are, on this account, “transitional”, and can, as Ricoeur puts the matter, “die out”(P.217) Human works, Ricoeur continues, are “fragile”(P.217). Events are divisible, and become “quasi-events”, that occur in a quasi-plot. Ricoeur uses Von Wrights technical concept of a “system” and claims that a plot can be composed of “rival systems”(P.220). The “revolution” for example, is one “system” or “model” that contrasts with the more powerful “model” or system of “evolution”.

Ricoeur ends this chapter with a dialectical account of the chronological component of the episodic event versus an achronological component, which is configurational, and best suited for the portrayal of longer time spans. “Historical structures”, he argues paradoxically, can die out. He then qualifies this with the claim that whilst the Mediterranean region cannot die, Philip II can ,and does.

In his separate conclusion to volume one, Ricoeur maintains that his ideas of quasi-plot, quasi-event, and quasi-character, are intended to call into question our traditional and rational accounts of History, in favour of an idea of narrative that appeals not to our understanding and reason, but rather to a perspectival view of the world and its relation to the power of our imaginations.

July 17, 2022October 8, 2022

Essay 5 Review of Ricoeur’s “Time and Narrative” :Narrative and Causality

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At stake in many of Ricoeur’s discussions, is the question of how to correctly characterise the complex issue of Causality in a Historical context. We do, for example, understand that the question “What caused X?” is an important question for a historian to answer. Ricoeur, consistently refuses, however, to directly adopt the Aristotelian position which argues for 4 different kinds of cause(Aitia–a word which also means “explanation”) regulated by 3 principles in the context of 4 kinds of change, 3 media of change(space, time, matter) and three different types of science(theoretical, practical, productive). For Aristotle, the metaphysical issue which drives all scientific activity in general, is manifested in the claim “all men desire to know”. History, we claimed in an earlier essay, is trans-scientific(concerned with all three types of science), and insofar as practical science and the ethical content of History is concerned, historical reflection is in Aristotelian terms “aiming at the Good”. This is not to be construed as it has been in analytical Philosophy as subjective or psychological, but is very much regulated by the categories of the understanding and the logical principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason.

Ricoeur turns his attention to analytical Philosophy and refers to the “covering law” model of History, calling, upon the critical work of William Dray:”Laws and Explanation in History”:

“Three fronts are opened up….On the first front, a purely negative criticism is carried out that concludes by disconnecting the concept of explanation from that of law. On the second front he pleads for a type of causal analysis that cannot be reduced to subsumption under laws…Finally, Dray explores a type of “rational explanation” that cover only a part of the field emancipated by the criticism of explanation in terms of empirical laws.”(P. 122)

Ricoeur elaborates upon this theme by acknowledging that the explanations we encounter in our History books, are ” a logically miscellaneous lot”(P.122). In the previous chapter Ricoeur pointed to “logical deficiencies” in the covering law model, but at issue in his discussion is a theoretical idea of law, and not the kind of laws we encounter in morality or a bona fide legal framework. We can certainly agree with Dray that the idea of “subsumption” is problematic, when used in the attempt to discuss the relation of the event to its explanation. For example, the event/action of failing to keep a promise not to pay money back to a creditor, is logically related to the “principle” “Promises ought to be kept”, and the use of the term subsumption in such circumstances is certainly problematic. Making the Judgement “Promises ought to be kept”, in relation to the event of non payment of debt, indicates a possible request for further explanation: “Why ought promises to be kept?”, and this in turn indicates that a reason can be given for the judgement in the form of the Categorical Imperative(“So act that you may will that the maxim of your action can be willed to become a universal law.”). Subsumption is a term better used, not at the level of a complex subject-predicate is-ought claim, but rather in the case of the subsumption of the subject under the concept expressed by the predicate. In such cases it is the categories of the understanding that regulate whether the subsumption is legitimate or not, whereas in the case of the relation of the subject-predicate claims to each other we are in the realm of reason and the principles of logic. In the case of the relation of the categorical imperative to the principle and the relation of the principle to the event of the non payment of the debt, it needs to be recognised that the term “moral law”, used to designate the categorical imperative, is an appropriate use. The term “covering law”, however, does carry with it implications of the mechanism of subsumption.

The emphasis upon subsumption and the way in which a concept relates to an object( a particular object) is continued in Ricoeur’s discussion of the uniqueness of a particular event. He points to the role of explanation as that which differentiates one object/event from another:

“historians do not proceed from the classificatory term toward the general law but from the classificatory term toward the explanation of differences.”(P.124-5)

This is an account of explanation in an inductive context of exploration/discovery, but it is less likely to be found in a historians writings, and more likely to be found in an academic discussion about historical thinking. Classificatory terms, on a Kantian account, are, of course, related to the categories of the understanding/judgement, if we are dealing with the case of statements claiming to be true. The way in which a concept of a subject relate to other concepts, is part of both the sense and reference of the statement. A revolution, to take a central historical example, may or may not be in the name of freedom, and the Categorical imperative. A Historian, that is, may wish to categorise the intention of a revolution in terms of the law of freedom, but as the revolution develops over time the Historian may be increasingly reluctant to use positive moral judgements in those cases where violence is used, because of an attachment to democratic principles, which in turn favours the rule of law and non violent means of settling disputes in a nation. Kant, in fact, found himself in this ambiguous position in relation to the event of the French Revolution.

Ricoeur believes the categories of the understanding, and principles of reason to be irrelevant to his phenomenological/hermeneutic attempt to provide an account of historical explanation. The focus is turned upon judgement, and the procedural principles of justice that are used to decide whether a defendant is guilty or non-guilty. The weighing of evidence is necessary, Ricoeur argues, to arrive at the judgement of guilt or innocence. This, in the legal sphere, is activity that falls clearly in the context of exploration/discovery, and until the judgement is final, it is the “hypothesis” of the state that the defendant is guilty. As we shift from this context to the context of explanation/justification and ask, for example, why the defendant was found guilty, we may refer to both the evidence and the formulation of the law that was broken. The judge in this context is using his knowledge of the law to direct the proceedings of the court , hear the evidence, and move logically toward a correct judgement. Here we do not see induction alone deciding the proceedings , but rather see a deductive movement from the law to the evidence to the judgement. The principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason will be intimately involved in this context of justification. This nomological-deductive structure is not, then, only applicable to the activity of the natural scientist, but is also operating in the realm of ethics and the law, and there is no reason not to believe it is also operating in the realm of History. Ricoeur prefers to focus on the context of exploration/discovery and would regard appeals to the nomological-deductive structure in these contexts as dogmatic. He believes, that is, that:

“another explanation different from that by laws is referred to as a “warrant” which will be called causal explanation.”(P.125)

Causal explanation, that is, becomes in Ricoeur’s eyes, an alternative to explanations in terms of the principles and laws outlined above. This of course requires accepting the following condition:

“if there are singular causal connections whose explanatory force does not depend on law.”(P.125)

The picture that is struggling to emerge in this discussion is that of Hume’s account in which one singular billiard ball strikes another singular billiard ball, and the mind moves from “one event occurring after another”, to “one event occurring because of another”. This account characterises causation as something “psychological”–a habit of mind. The description given here is clearly favouring a process of induction in a context of exploration/discovery: a process which hopes to arrive at some kind of particular terminus.

Ricoeur takes up a Historical example of what he calls an “alleged causal law”: “tyranny causes revolution”. He claims that this is not a law but rather a second-order generalisation based on an inductive gathering of particular facts. There is no doubt that in the minds of Plato, Aristotle, and Kan,t this was a law-like principled presupposition that had to be part of the political organisation of a well-ordered polis. Certainly, for Plato and Aristotle, this “alleged causal law” was a principle of justice(diké). For Kant too, this would have been an important categorical principle of his political philosophy, and intimately connected to the freedom of the people in a polis. Kant would certainly have used this principle as a premise in arguments explaining the occurrence of some revolutions . Ricoeur claims that there are causal laws integrated into the fabric of what he calls “narratives”, but unless he wishes to acknowledge a much wider meaning of the term “causal”, such as we encounter in hylomorphic and critical philosophy, the only way in which “cause” can be integrated into a plot is in terms of “one thing after another”. The plot of Shakespeare’s Macbeth is driven by a cause involving the usurpation of the power of a king, and the effect of the deterioration of the mind of the guilty party, and it is clear, because of the universal intent of this plot, that we can legitimately say “one thing occurred because of the other”. The universal intent of this plot is clearly connected to the ancient Greek project of “knowing thyself”, and this project in turn “aims” at The Good.

Ricoeur’s preference for the term “warrant” reminds us of Gilbert Ryle’s appeal in his work “The concept of mind”, in which he referred to dispositions as “law-like”, and whilst the word “warrant” may concretise the problem, it does not solve the aporetic problem of the universality and necessity of causal laws, or the problem of whether these can be found in History.

Ricoeur turns to the work of Dray and agrees surprisingly to the use of rational explanations in relation to the action of agents, but it is also clear that what this amounts to, is not a logical connection between action and its circumstances, but rather some kind of hypothetical means-ends calculation. Means-ends judgements are instrumental /hypothetical judgements which fall into a different category of judgement in comparison with judgements that are characterising “ends-in-themselves”. The former do not command the same level of universality and necessity as the latter. Ricoeur appeals in this discussion to Aristotle’s theory of deliberation, and claims that in order to establish what he calls the “logical equilibrium of this calculation” we must:

“inductively gather the evidence that allows us to evaluate the problem as the agent saw it.”(P.129)

Ricoeur also argues that Dray’s account of “calculation”, is related to “probability”, but there is a suggestion that if we proceed in the above fashion we might find ourselves defending a position of methodological individualism, and opening up an abyss between individual explanation and the explanation of large scale historical processes. Ricoeur leaves this discussion hanging in the ai,r and turns instead to a consideration of how causal explanations and teleological inferences may be related. Aristotle is paradoxically invoked as being dialectically opposed to a “unified scientific method” in the name of “methodological pluralism”, a term which Ricoeur has a tendency to interpret relativistically. Aristotle, we know, was not opposed to unifying all science under a universal and necessary “desire to know,” and he would also claim that all the three different types of science(theoretical, practical, productive) are concerned with the unifying themes of the media of change, causes of change, and the principles of change. Aristotle would also openly admit that the three different types of science differ in their methods and domain of application.

Von Wright is appealed to in relation to the Tractarian view of the world: a world composed of atomic states of affairs combined into a totality. Von Wright asks the obvious question of whether the world we live in satisfies the criteria laid out in Wittgensteins Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus and his answer is that this is a:

“deep and difficult metaphysical question, and I do not know how to answer it.”(P.133 in Ricoeur)

Reference is then made to “ontological building blocks” whose constitution is unknown to us. This deep and difficult metaphysical discussion, however, makes no reference to Aristotelian metaphysics in which “change”, rather than “states of the world” is the starting point of all philosophical reflection. Kant’s critical Philosophy would also appear to accept the above Aristotelian starting point, and perhaps claim that we live in both the phenomenal and the noumenal world. Kant’s position implies that the ontological claims of atomism are trying to say something that cannot be said. This reminds one of Wittgenstein’s long time reluctance to give an example of an atomic proposition. He too claimed that the propositions of the Tractatus were attempting to say what cannot be said, and should be used as ladders which must then be discarded after being used. Von Wright thinks it sufficient to add “tense-logic” to the Wittgensteinian world-view, in order to generate historical statements. He also adds the idea of a system defined as :

” a state-space, or initial state, a number of stages of development, and a set of alternative moves for each stage”(P.134)

Systems are subject to interventions by “free and responsible agents”(P.134). On this account, states take the place of events and actions, and this appears at first sight to be problematic, given the static nature of states and the dynamic nature of events and actions. We know that Wittgenstein characterised states of affairs in terms of the concatenation of objects. We also know it would be difficult to fully analyse the Kantian event of a ship sailing downstream with this “model”. Artificially breaking the event up into a number of temporal atoms(nows), would seem not to capture this event as lived by an observing subject. On Von Wright’s account, it is possible to characterise the event of the ship sailing downstream as a “systematic state” that is “developing”. Action, on this account, becomes a problem that is solved by construing it as a “closed” system, and is characterised as “interfering” with the world. On this account it is difficult not to regard the subject as just another cause in a chain of causes transforming a closed system into a deterministic system(which of course has always been an ancient aim of atomism). Wittgenstein tried to avoid this problem by mystically situating the subject at the boundary of the world or outside the world. Von Wright calls upon the work of the analytical Philosopher Danto, and his work on basic actions to resolve the aporetic questions that arise in relation of the linking of Action to causality. Teleological explanation is invoked in order to neutralise the impression that there is only a causal bond between different phases of action. Von Wright claims that the tie between a reason and an action, is a “motivational mechanism”(P.138) and he also makes an appeal to the concept of “intention”: behaviour is “intentionalistically understood”, it is argued, and this is necessary in order for it to be teleologically explained. History, Ricoeur argues in this context, is connected to a theory of Action and he refers to Von Wright’s claim that:

“the behaviours intentionality is its place in a story about the agent.”(P.139 in Ricoeur)

Narrative , Ricoeur argues, includes both the circumstances of any action plus its unintended consequences, and the action is likened unto the use of language which is characterised in Wittgensteinian terms as “:

” a gesture whereby I mean something”(P.139 in Ricoeur)

Ricoeur continues with the claim that historical explanations are not fully teleological but are rather “quasi-causal”. This claim is then immediately mitigated by an acknowledgement that there are indeed many different kinds of explanation in historical texts. In addition to the internal relations between an intention and an action and its consequences, there are also external relations between two events, e.g. the assassination in Sarajevo and the outbreak of War.

Ricoeur regards Von Wrights account as incomplete and wishes to tie into one intelligible whole, “circumstances, goals, interactions, and intended results”, using the emplotment strategy of narrative. Ricoeur insists, in the context of this discussion, that causal explanation is preceded by narrative understanding. This, he insists paradoxically, requires the rejection of the “covering law” model which construes narrative as episodic and not as a configurational or transfigurational mechansm. Ricouer refers to Danto’s account of “narrative sentences”, in an attempt to link historical explanation and our understanding of narrative. He points out that Danto is an analytical Philosophy and also that analytical Philosophy is:

“in essence a theory of descriptions”(P.144)

Danto, like many analytical philosophers, hold up the idealism of Hegel as a position to avoid –not because of its controversial use of the dialectical method, but because of its pretension to understand the whole of history. Following upon this criticism, it is bluntly stated by Ricoeur, that it is not possible to make judgements about the future unless they are extrapolations from the past. Narratives, it is maintained, on the other hand, possess the power to re-describe past events in the light of events that occur subsequently, and it is this power that primarily interests Ricoeur, because, as he puts it:

“there is no history of the future”(P144)

Danto, on the other hand, claims that every narrative sentence written by a historian is subject to revision by a later historian, and that some historical explanations do not have a narrative structure. No reference is made in this discussion to the fact that Classical historians recommended waiting 30 years before writing about events, because some important chains of events take time to complete themselves. This enabled these historians to have a knowledge of the future of past events. On this classical view, it is maintained that a history of the present and the future are not possible until 30 years later. This “waiting period” was also important because it allowed for the appearance of important documents. Even if at present, documents are becoming available much quicker, there is the problem of completely and correctly describing events such as the 30 year war whilst it is still ongoing. There is of course more than a whiff of logical atomism and logical positivism in Danto’s account that Ricoeur does not comment upon. The description of an earlier event in terms of a subsequent one, of course, occurs on the logical level of particular events, and this leaves us with the problem of accounting for the abstract entities of principles and laws(e.g. the future will resemble the past), as they are presented in historical writing. Some forms of explanation rely heavily on these abstract entities. Danto replaces the “covering law” model with a “covering descriptions” model that is essentially describing particulars. This is why Danto is forced to admit that descriptions in the end will have to “count” as explanations. Such descriptions will certainly allow us to characterise efficient causes in a Humean manner, but there will be problems in using Danto’s account to characterise the universality and necessity of formal and final causes.

Ricoeur criticises Danto’s account for its failure to distinguish between the narrative sentence, and a narrative text which connects particular events. He looks then to the work of W B Gaillie, “Philosophy and Historical Understanding”, to fill a whole left by Danto’s account of narrative sentences.(P.149) Gaillie’s thesis is that historical explanations are intimately related to the narrative form in which they are embedded. Explanation, that is, is derived from the structure of narrative. Ricoeur argues that the following of a story to its conclusion is to be distinguished from following an argument to its conclusion, in that whilst the former has to be merely acceptable, the latter has to meet the criteria of universality and necessity, and provide us with some kind of prediction. Ricoeur then claims that the type of intelligence involved in these two cases is different.

Aristotle is accused by Ricoeur of being the source of what he refers to as the “subjective factor” or “subjective teleology” involved in the appreciation of a narrative. Expectations and attractions are, he argues a part of this “psychology of reception”(P.151). This, needless to say is not consistent with Aristotles account of art. which he characterises as a productive knowledge-using practical science, in which the elements concerned are not subjective but rather present in the creation because of the artists conducting his creative activity in the spirit of areté(doing the right thing in the right way at the right time). All activities, we are also told by Aristotle in the Nichomachean Ethics, aim at The Good, and Art is no exception to this universal claim. The aim of art is also to help us with the task of knowing ourselves by understanding the role of what is subjective and what is objective, in this search for The Good in the form of the Beautiful.

Aristotle would have been bewildered if confronted by the account of the world we are given in the Tracatatus, namely, that the world is the totality of facts and not things. He would have pointed out that, given the complex structure of our powers of mind, we cannot be satisfied with a mere description of the facts, but would demand explanations in terms of the principles that explain the facts: we wish, that is, to understand both what is happening and why it is happening. Aristotles account of tragedy puts causality clearly on display, and the learning that occurs in this case is not subjectively connected with a modern “psychology of reception”, but is, rather, concerned with the message the artist is attempting to communicate with “universal intent”, or as Kant would put the matter, in a “universal voice”. If the narrative of a tragedy can incorporate causality—“one thing because of another”—there ought not to be any difficulty with History manifesting the different kinds of causation Aristotle spoke about. Transplanting Aristotle’s ideas into the modern subjective-objective philosophical jargon, and the modern context of a “psychology of reception”, does not appear to be helpful, if we are to understand the logical structure of narration. In Historical narrative, the idea of the Good is important, but in a different way to the way in which the idea of The Good forms part of our idea of the beautiful. There is no doubt, however, that in terms of the nomological-deductive structure of Aristotles productive science, narratives satisfy the desire to know, and laws and principles are operative in the form of presuppositions even if they are not always articulated in the text.

Historical narrative must therefore be structured to answer “Why?” questions and must, as a consequence, allow principles to be operating in the course of events that are the objects of the narrative. Ricoeur, as we have seen, dismisses the nomological-deductive structure in favour of the ability of an audience to “follow” the story. This is clearly a descriptive rather than explanatory activity. Remaining at this descriptive level allows Ricoeur to search for a pragmatic justification:

“the criterion of a good explanation is a pragmatic one”(P.155)

which of course takes us back to the idea of a mind calculating means to ends, rather than a mind understanding categories and principles. The activity of contemplating “The Good” does not, as Ricoeur claims, take us back to the realm of judgement about particulars related to other particulars, or the connection of episodic causes, but rather takes us into the realm of practical understanding and practical reasoning and the architectonic structure of concepts and principles.

July 13, 2022October 8, 2022

Essay 4: Review of Ricoeur’s “Time and Narrative”: Explanations and Misunderstandings

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Narratives are often produced by someone in order to describe a course of a chain of events for various purposes: e.g. to inform, to educate, to entertain. Responding to this form of description, demands acts of understanding and reasoning that involve different cognitive powers which are not involved in investigations, (situated in contexts of exploration/discovery), where the issue may be to arrive at the formulation of a principle, rather than proceeding from a principle, as is the case in investigations situated in contexts of explanation/justification. In this latter case, what we are witnessing, is a categorically driven conceptual investigation aiming, not primarily at description, but rather at larger concerns connected with second-order questions relating to “Why” things are as they are, i.e. concerns related to Truth/Knowledge and Justice/The Good.

In the case of the production and understanding of fictional narrative, we are more concerned with the dignity and worth of character, than with a historical account of the forces of ruin and destruction ravaging our civilisations. We know, for example, from the dramatic accounts of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, that the ruin and destruction supposedly caused by Duncan may well have been fictional, but that fact nevertheless does not detract from the value of the play, which centres around an account of the deterioration of the mental health of a tyrannical ruler(similar to the one given in the later books of the Republic as part of an account of “justice”). Much can be learned in the process of appreciating this work, which involves a therapeutical cathartic play of the emotions of pity and fear. Ethical principles are also involved in a process which is clearly aiming at self-knowledge, and knowledge of the world and how it actually operates, rather than how it ought ideally to operate. For example, the Kantian principle “Promises ought to be kept”, does not say that it is a fact that promises are kept, but rather, in the case that they are not kept, this principle is invoked in relation to the categorical imperative to make the judgement that promises ought to be kept.

The medium of fictional narrative centres around the key concept of mimesis, as understood by both Plato and Aristotle. For both philosophers, fictional narrative imitated the forms or ideas that were the principles of understanding and reason, operating in the real world of the city, whether that be in the everyday milieu of the agora, or the more esoteric milieu of the offices and institutions of the city. The mimesis of these activities involves representing them for a purpose that is not real but rather ideal, and related to the artists intentions and the ideas he has about his art. Here there is a hylomorphic structure to this activity, but it has different material, efficient, formal and final causes or conditions compared to those we find in the real world. As mentioned above ethical considerations, practical categories of understanding and principles of reason, are also important constitutive elements of the plot of the narrative of the tragic poet, and are an important part of his creative intentions. Techné and epistemé are important aspects of the productive and theoretical sciences involved in this creative process. Phronesis, diké and areté are also involved, but have their home in the practical sciences. Understanding therefore, must on such a complex account, be a complex power operating at several different levels regulated by both the categories of the understanding and the principles of reason(e.g. principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason). The context of this artistic operation must be primarily that of explanation/justification and the question “Why did X occur?”, if X is an action, demands a reason for the action, in contrast to the situation where X is an event in which case the “Why?” question might be asking for a cause or condition. The reason for an action is teleological and can either refer to the maxim for the action or the principle governing the action(e.g. the principle of happiness or self love or the principle of the categorical imperative).

Ricoeur wishes to relate the narrative structure of history to the above form of fictional narrative, and this is an important claim to make, given the inevitable relation of History to the beginnings, middles, and endings that are constitutive of the human life-process. Both forms of narrative also concentrate attention upon actions and events of magnitude. In the case of History, it is the spatial entity of the city or nation and the forces of ruin and destruction which threaten civilisation, which is in focus. In the case of fictional narrative we are concerned primarily with the fate of individuals, although the question of the flourishing life of the city or nation may also be the concern of the artist.

One problematic claim made by Ricoeur in this context, however, is that the narrative of History is derivative from the fictional form of narrative whilst at the same time being rooted in the temporal structures of action. Ricoeur argues that History “constructs” its own temporality which refers to reality “obliquely”(P.92). The reality being referred to is that of actual events that have taken place in the past. Part of the intentionality of historical thought is connected to its epistemological commitment to knowledge about the past, and also connected, from a practical point of view, with the powers of understanding and reason. This latter commitment occurred in the spirit of areté(doing the right thing in the right way at the right time). In this field of praxis, History and Law share many of the same concerns. Historical laws have, of course, a different logical structure than the laws of theoretical science, which relate to reality in the mode of what events must of necessity occur. Historical laws are norm-constituting in the mode of the ought(of what ought to occur in reality), e.g. the future ought to resemble the past. This kind of law will also be integrated with ethical and political laws(relating to diké, justice). The idea of event will be less important in the case of the ethical laws that are justified by the categorical imperative, which may take different forms , e.g. treat everyone as ends in themselves but which all imply action(So act…). Ricoeur’s characterisation of an event moreover, that a historical event is a one time unique event in the temporal history of civilisations, abstracts from all non-temporal characteristics and adopts the Cartesian spatio-temporal coordinate system, which is essentially a mathematical system designed to measure motion and physical change. Such a view is, then, the result of a mathematical view of time that is connected to an obsession with scientific methodology by English and German positivists. Ricoeur in fact criticises this position, but nevertheless presents an account of “event” which many positivists would embrace:

“Whether it be a question of statistical frequency, causal connection, or functional relation, an event is what only happens once.”(P.97)

In a discussion of the work of Aron and Weber, Ricoeur elaborates upon this position by quoting Aron:

“As for the probability born of the partial character of historical analyses and causal relations, it exists in our own minds, not in things.”(P.98 in Ricoeur)

Ricoeur continues in his reasoning:

“In this respect historical appraisal of probability differs from the logic of the scientist and is closer to that of the judge.”(P.98)

This reasoning is then confronted with Marrou’s claim, which rejects the proposition that historical understanding is subjective( as defined by the methodological individualism of many social scientists). Ricoeur’s discussion takes on an “atomistic” character, and a formula is sought to relate the “atoms” of the event and the individual. The “method” used is one of dialectical confrontation. The question “Is history the history of events or individuals?” is, of course, from the point of view of historical understanding, a poorly formulated question, which may well require abandoning the characterisations of event and the subjective-objective distinction referred to in this chapter.

Ricoeur then introduces Hempel into the discussion . Hempel’s is a scientific view which rejects all connections of the idea of an “event” with narrative transfigurations. The event is depicted in terms of a “universal-particular” relation in which historical events are no less mystically “subsumed” under a more general concept of event of a specific type, which, in turn, is logically related to antecedent conditions and so-called “regularities”. Clearly the kind of universality invoked here is theoretical, but may well also be related to the assumption that the future will resemble the past. This attempted detachment of the practical intention, practical understanding, and practical reasoning, from the historical conceptualisation of historical events removed History from ethics and the practical sciences and this was viewed with suspicion by many professional historians.

Ricoeur criticises the above account by Hempel on the grounds that it is too prescriptive!. According to Ricoeur, History is not yet a fully developed science, and is therefore prone to idealistic characterisations. Both Ricoeur and Hempel agree that historical explanations are in some sense incomplete. Hempel-followers settled upon a compromise position that History may not possess laws, but rather law-like principles which provide us with explanation-sketches. This is not an action-focussed account of History, which would, in fact, require consideration of the prescriptive form of imperative and a narrative motivated by Reasons for Actions rather than the causes of events. The criticism of Hempel offered by Ricoeur, is that he fails to distinguish between a historical event and a physical event. Historical events, according to Ricoeur, are characterised in terms of singular statements that refer to the occurrence of unique events at very specific and unique times and places.

Such historical events cannot be the matter of narratives which clearly possess the logical characters of universality and necessity. This view of “event” does, however, allow Ricouer to artificially attach a value to the event, and assign the event a cause, which the hermeneutic method can then “Interpret” the meaning of. Here, what Ricoeur calls the “terminal consequences”(P.119), are important, but he also insists that there may well occur a conflict of interpretations in the assigning of terminal consequences in a causal chain. Marx is mentioned in the context of this discussion and Ricoeur claims:

“Either interpretation can be objective and true with regard to the causal sequences upon which it is elaborated….there is a place for critical pluralism.”(P.119)

It is, of course, not merely the dialectical materialism of Marx that is historically problematic, but also the fact that the ancient view of diké(justice) is marginalised as is the Enlightenment insistence upon the importance of the practical idea of freedom in important actions/events such as revolutions.

July 10, 2022October 7, 2022

Essay 3: Review of Ricoeur’s “Time and Narrative”: Metaphorical action and Metaphorical Time.

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Phenomenology and Hermeneutics are the philosophical tools Ricoeur uses to articulate the relations between time, as opaquely lived, and time as transfigured through the process of mimesis, which in its turn results in the narrative that is organised by a plot. The field of application for the use of these tools is the field of meaning in which we find “the arc of operations”:

“by which practical experience provides itself with works, authors, and readers.”(P.53)

Ricoeur appears to believe that the foundation of our epistemological relation to reality rests upon the field of meaning, which is a significantly different entity from the Aristotelian field of the “many meanings of Being”, and a significantly different entity to the field of philosophy defined by the 4 Kantian questions:

“What can we know? What ought we to do? What can we hope for?What is man?”

Ricoeur’s declared intentions are, as we know, neither connected to Aristotelian hylomorphic or Kantian critical Philosophy, but sail closer to the winds of Heideggerian ontology and Hegelian dialectic as part of an investigation into the medium of language.

The poetic adventure begins with a pre-comprehension of the form of life which is centred upon the meaning of Action: its symbolic structure, motives, and goals as well as upon the practical kind of knowledge involved in techné. In this realm, the critical Philosophy of Kant regard the categories of Agent and Patient as critical elements which Kant expresses in terms of what the agent does, and what happens to the agent. Heideggerian instrumentalities embedded in an instrumental context of involvements, unfortunately, efface this ontological distinction in favour of a practical-theoretical distinction between what is ready-to-hand and what is at present-at-hand. Agency, and its relation to the will disappears in this account in favour of a discussion of the relation of objects to one another, and our relation to these objects. The desk is related to to the pen which in turn refers to the paper. This context must involve the motives and goals of the agent, but these are marginalised. This, of course, is part of the Heideggerian strategy to avoid what he calls the subjective-objective dialectic that threatens to envelop all action into the sphere of a relativistic sphere of subjectivity.

The motives of the agent engaged in the mimesis of the temporality of everyday life, which transforms the temporality of the kind of “poetic” narrative we find in a technical object such as a tragic play, involves a process of transfiguration of the temporality of everyday action. This process requires a philosophical investigation that involves the categories of the understanding, as well as the teleological reasoning required in the explanation/justification of actions, and the technical objects created by such action. Insofar as we are also dealing with the fate and destiny of characters as determined by the plot of the work, the plot itself must embody a telos that relates to the Kantian practical idea of freedom, and the exercise of reason that is involved in the agents desire and practical search for a flourishing life. This reference to Aristotelian hylomorphism or Kantian critical Philosophy would not be acceptable to either Ricoeur or Heidegger’s existential/phenomenological approach, which seeks as part of its mission to neutralise these forms of rationalism.

Ricoeur calls the transfiguration of Time that we encounter in mimetic narrative, “constructed time”(P.54). What may be a source of confusion in this discussion is a recognition of the difference between a theoretical account of Time(the measurement of motion in terms of before and after) and a practical account of time, the experience of which is both lived and regulated by the sensory powers we possess. Time, of course, can be conceived of in terms of “events” that “happen” in our lives, but it is also the case that our sensory powers play an active role in organising our life-world activities, especially in relation to that final “event” of our life-world—our death. We all owe nature a death and it is on the journey toward this ultimate terminus that we form our destinies and determine the quality of our lives. Heidegger’s contribution toward this discussion lies in his idea of what he calls the being-toward-death that characterises the practical active life of Dasein.

Narratives, Ricoeur argues, focus on both acting and suffering but the emphasis is on “description” rather than explanation/justification. It is “method” in a context of exploration/discovery that is important in phenomenological investigations:this methodical emphasis occurs at the expense of “principles” and their determining role in the understanding of phenomena. It is, to be more precise, the understanding of the principles of acting and suffering that determine the art of plot composition, and the art of plot interpretation. The “Implicit phenomenology” of “doing something” isolates itself deliberately from the organising principle of a will considering alternative avenues of action (from the rational perspective of universality and necessity). If the kind of action under consideration is self-evaluative, and related to the worth of the agent as measured by arché, areté and diké, then the choice is categorical, and the categorical imperative both explains and justifies any action or suffering on the part of an agent concerned with the task of “knowing thyself”. If, instead, we are concerned with imperatives justifying instrumental action, hypothetical imperatives will explain/justify the action concerned. These will not necessarily be a concern of the tragic narrative, where the issue is exactly that of determining the worth of the agent. Here we are not in the realm of “meaning” but rather in the domains of knowledge and ethics, and by implication, concerned with the metaphysically loaded questions, “What can we know?” and “What ought we to do?” The attempts to answer such questions cannot confine themselves to merely “describing phenomena”.

For Ricoeur, the notion of “symbol” is important in all activities concerned with the interpretation of the “meaning” of what is occurring. The role of the principle of “the Good” is however, obscure and not articulated in Ricoeur’s reflections on the interpretation of tragic narratives. Ricoeur, indeed, raises the possibility of an ethically neutral narrative, where the controlling idea is to establish what he calls an “ethical laboratory”(P.59), thereby clearly situating this particular phenomenological investigation in a context of exploration/discovery. The spirit of such enquiries is that best expressed by the question “What do we have here?”, rather than “Why did X do A?” The answer to this latter question must of necessity be a rational answer given that the question is obviously asking for a reason for an action that has been freely chosen.

Ricoeur contrasts Augustine’s emphasis upon the present-ness of Time with Heidegger’s commitment to the future expressed in the idea of being-towards-death. Heidegger rests this particular argument on Care, which he claims constitutes the unity of Dasein– that being for whom his being is a question. Care testifies to the commitment of Heidegger to an instrumental form of practical reasoning that Kant would characterise in terms of hypothetical imperatives. Heidegger also speaks of the past, and uses the term “historicality”. We are, Heidegger argues, thrown into the world and into a temporal structure that he characterises as “within-time”. We reckon with time in our life-world before we measure time, it is argued. This reckoning occurs in the context of “work” which occurs “within” the span or fundamental unit of a “day”. The term “work” obviously has essential connections to both acting and suffering. To the extent to which we measure the time of our work by referring to clocks and the time that it is “now”, we can divide our day theoretically into a string of “nows”, “before’s” and “after’s”. It is only if we detach this string of denominators from Care for the work, that we are able to create a theoretical linear chain of causality, in which the motion of one event “causes” the motion of another event in the spirit of the Humean analysis of causation. The actual understanding we have of the causes and reasons for acting and suffering, create no need for the construction of a mathematical spatio-temporal coordinate system, that is best used in order to give an account of the relation of material-physical objects and quantities of motion.

The “moments” or “nows” of a narrative, e.g. “Is this a dagger I see before me?”, are clearly connected in the plot to befores and afters, and the kind of question which naturally arises in relation to this moment is not merely “What is the cause of this experience?”, but also “What kind of future is this moment signalling?” (“What is the teleological reason for this moment?”). It is obvious that the artist cannot discover the meaning of this moment after he creates it, if he does not possess a prior idea of its telos. The momentum of the narrative is forward pointing, and it is the future of the narrative that motivates the continued interest of the reader/audience in the proceedings.

There are important differences between History and Poetic Tragedy(both of which are narratives of care even if the former is concerned with the befores and the latter with the afters in the temporal continuum of the respective narratives). Aristotle elaborates upon this difference, and favours poetic narrative over historical narrative because of its “universality”. The genre of historical writing was, however, only to establish its subject-identity later in the cultural development of the West, and when it did, it would not do so as merely a record of a totality of particular facts ordered on a spatio-temporal continuum, but must rather include judgements relating to our Care for a human form of being-in-the-world—-universal judgements embedded in a context of principles of explanation/justification. Historical understanding too, must connect to the future in this context. The Delphic prophecy, namely, that all things created by man is destined for ruin and destruction, of course, hover over the judgements of the Historian like Banquo’s ghost, as do the words from the Enlightenment “Sapere Audi”(Dare to use your reason!”). The words of the oracle may contain much truth but there was, for both Aristotle and Kant, a logical space for a meaningful answer to the question “What can we hope for?”. Kant’s philosophical answer to this question is that in the far distant future there is a state of the world in which ruin and destruction are a thing of the past.

The difference between the role of factual knowledge in the two different types of narrative, are nevertheless important. In the poetic tragedy of Macbeth, the hallucinatory experience of the dagger, is an important event, and whilst it is true that Macbeth is hallucinating, it is nevertheless not true that he is in the presence of a real dagger. In the historical account of Macbeth, there may be no trace of this experience or the presence of witches. Such an account will only contain verifiable facts which are founded upon documentary evidence. That is Macbeth may not have been an agent of ruin and destruction at all but merely a ruler attempting to rule in difficult circumstances.

The mimesis of Shakespeare’s tragedies are important from the point of view of providing the cultural community with insight into the mind of a tyrant. In this respect the tragedy of Macbeth is merely a dramatised account of the philosophical dialogue we find in the late books of the Republic. In Socrates´ narrative, the consequences of tyrannical rule are outlined in terms of the ruin and destruction it brings down upon the city, and also in terms of the inevitable violent death of the tyrant. This discussion is part of a response to Glaucon, in the earlier books of the Republic, demanding that Socrates prove that Justice is both good in itself, and good in its consequences. In both kinds of narrative the imagination obviously supplements the work of the powers of understanding and reason. The artistic genius of Shakespeare uses the cathartic formula of Aristotle in his presentation of the deterioration of a mind intent upon usurping the throne at all costs. That it is, in fact, probably not true of Macbeth is less important than the fact that it is important to focus aesthetically upon the forces of good and evil in order that audiences may learn how to avoid the ruin and destruction brought upon the city by agents that fail to understand how their own minds are functioning( the major focus is nevertheless on the future of the city). You will not find any attempt by Shakespeare to install an “experimental laboratory” in his theatre. The learning experience, for both Shakespeare and Aristotle, resides in the Platonic insight we are given into the human mind in general, and pathological minds in particular: an insight that is in accordance with another Delphic challenge, namely to “Know thyself!” In this process diké was presented by Socrates as something that was both good in itself and good in its consequences, and getting what one deserved was part of this concept of justice. If in the modern spirit of creating an experimental laboratory, elements of experience were all thrown randomly into the cauldron of the work, without any idea of the good or justice, and a narrative was produced in which a tyrant brought down ruin and destruction upon the city he ruled, but prospered and led a flourishing life. This would be anathema for the classical mind and the work would be experienced as a farce rather than a tragedy. In this witches cauldron of bits and pieces of experience, nothing significant could be learned about life, and it’s relation to justice. One philosophical hypothesis that has been produced in this “experimental” spirit is that our Western tradition is on its way to a ruinous end–an apocalypse– and there will be a period of “The last days of terror”. This hypothesis has played no small part in the installing of the fear of terrorism in our modern consciousness. A fear that left very little space for pity, except perhaps a form of narcissistic self-pity. There is, of course, a limit to how many times one can say that something is coming to and end without that end actually occurring. The hypothesis sooner or later will become otiose, but the danger is that in the process of “living this hypothesis” the mind loses interest in the classical matrix of arché, areté, diké, epistemé and phronesis. These ideas form the bedrock of our hopes and expectations, and without such a foundation there is a distinct danger that life and action lose their meaning, and our value system becomes inverted as part of this process of “forgetfulness”.

The History of suffering certainly calls for a human response, but perhaps not one in which terrorism features: a scenario in which our thought moves to vengeance and a vision of the last days of our civilisation. The ancient Greeks provided us with a matrix of ideas which they believed was a philosophical formula for leading a flourishing life. It is this matrix, rather than the modern experience of alienation and despair that best structures human expectation, and the hope for a better and brighter future. The learning experience that follows from the mimesis or imitation of actions, centres around characters that may die. If, however, they die in a value-vacuum without in some sense deserving to die because they brought down ruin and destruction upon themselves and everyone else, then we are in the realm of the meaningless: what we would be witnessing would be a form of existence that is possible but not desirable(a scenario constructed by an imagination that is functioning in a value-vacuum).

Ricoeur, in this chapter also embarks upon a reflection upon the role of language in a work of art. Appeal is made to the sense-reference distinction that Frege introduced in his “Theory of meaning”, and the claim is made that reference to reality is indeed important in the interpretation of the language of poetic works(P.80). The language of such works is, however, not descriptive, but “metaphorical”. This is all part of a hermeneutical account of literary symbols, and Ricoeur elaborates upon this position by claiming that in reconstructing the temporality of action and suffering, we are also dealing with “metaphorical” language. The fictional narrative, Ricoeur argues, is presented in the spirit of “as if”. The events in some sense do not exist and this is part of the hermeneutic attempt to escape a subject-object argument which would place much that is of human importance into a category of “the subjective”, and embrace positions which encourage experimental laboratories in which our human values are neutralised in favour of hypothetical world views. Heideggerian hermeneutics and its appeal to being-in-the-world, and being-towards death, is a form of reflection which has classical motivations and to that extent is less fixated upon the phenomenological attempt to describe, and more prepared to seek explanations and justifications for phenomena. It is in this spirit that Ricoeur claims that History is a guardian or night watchman ensuring the remembrance of the dead.

June 29, 2022October 7, 2022

Essay 2 on Ricoeur’s “Time and Narrative” Vol.1: Aristotle’s Poetics and Muthos

Ricoeur is one of the most significant writers in the realm of the relation of myth to Philosophy. The following is from his work “The Symbolism of Evil”:

“Myths will be here taken to mean what the history of religions now finds in it: not a false explanation by means of images and fables, but a traditional narration which relates to events that happened at the beginning of time and which has the purpose of providing grounds for the ritual actions of men today, and, in a general manner, establishing all the forms of action and thought by which man understands himself in his world. For us moderns a myth is only a myth because we no longer connect that time with the time of history as we write it, employing the critical method, nor can we connect mythical places with our geographical space. This is why myth can no longer be an explanation…But in losing its explanatory pretensions the myth reveals its exploratory significance and its contribution to understanding which we shall later call its symbolic function—-that is to say, its power of discovering and revealing the bond between man and what he considers sacred.”(P.5)

The limitations of myth may well have given birth to Philosophy, when it came to providing explanations demanded by aporetic questions, and raising issues relating to the infinite media of change, namely space, time and matter. It no longer seemed efficacious to personify Time by the figure or image of Chronos, engaging in the curious activity of eating his own children and being castrated by one of the most powerful of his children. Such images just did not seem to respond appropriately to the awe and wonder of a newly awoken consciousness in the face of the sublimity of life in a world of such complexity. These images did not possess the required universality and necessity of the philosophical principle of sufficient reason.

Cassirer in his work “Language and Myth”(Trans by Langer, S., K., New York, Dover, 1946), opens his work by reflecting upon the master of Myth himself, namely Plato. In the Phaedrus Socrates shows his impatience with claims of the god-like wind carrying someone away in order to account for their death. Reasoning in this way, he argues, risks allowing the imagination to run free which in turn merely raise the demand for explanations relating to the existence of monsters and gods. Such investigations, Socrates argued distracted one from the aporetic question par excellence of Philosophy, namely the Delphic task of knowing oneself.

Cassirer quotes Max Muller(The Philosophy of Mythology, London, 1973), and highlights his claim that myth arises from the illusions of language, making it some kind of pathological phenomenon. This conflicts with Ricoeur’s account above. Cassirer rejects Mullers account on Kantian grounds and argues instead, that the figures of myth:

“refer to some given reality by means of suggestion and allegorical renderings, but in the sense of forces each of which produces and posits a world of its own.”(P.8)

The question to raise here is whether Plato, the master of the mythical illustration we find in the later books of the Republic, would have found some truth in the above quote. His allegories of the cave, the divided line, and the sun are after all, not merely artistic embellishments, but are meant seriously to complement the rational argumentation in this work. The physical sun, for example, is an analogue of the good, and there is nothing pathological about seeing the resemblance between the sun and its relation to physical life, and the good and its relation to the ethical good-spirited, flourishing life. True, there is no obvious connection of such allegories to religion, but we also know that there have been religions in which worship of the sun played a significant role. For Aristotle, we know, Being had many meanings, and awe and wonder in the face of this Being, gave rise to the desire to understand these meanings. For Plato it was the “form of the good” which was the primary form, and this strategically suggested that for him practical rationality was more important than the more theoretical pursuit of knowledge and Truth. It is also important to point out that this priority is to be found in Kantian critical Philosophy too. Cassirer insists that the words we have for divine entities carries with it a suggestive power that ought not to be underestimated. Heraclitus, we also know, found what he thought to be a philosophical connection between what he termed “logos” and the divine. The two terms “logos” and muthos”, insofar as Ricoeur is concerned, form a coordinate system for discourse in the arena of religious discourse. This borders on the territory of Poetry which Aristotle concerns himself with, but in Aristotle there is a clear distinction between the ethical focus of the Poetics and the kind of mythical speculation that attempts to say something about the beginning of time in a context of the infinite media of change.

The term “mimesis”, however, aligns us more closely with the Socratic rejection of myth in the search for self-knowledge. For Aristotle mimesis praxeos has very clear ethical and aesthetic implications. Aristotle’s Poetics gives us an account of the function of narrative that ties the beginning, middle and end of the attempt to represent or imitate action into a composite whole. This composition or plot refuses a reduction into episodic point-like events, because the creator is concerned to connect events/actions in a universal manner. The theme of this universality is more concerned with areté(doing the right thing in the right way at the right time) and diké, than the divine logos. The Spectator of the drama learns from what he witnesses, the possibilities related to a tragic reversal of fortune from good to bad. Involved in this learning process is a recognition that we all get what we deserve, in the spirit of diké. The universals involved in this context are not theoretical but related to the logos of ethical and political action and thought. For Socrates the logos of these forms of the good were also related to his need to consult with his inner daimon, when elenchus appeared to fail to provide the wisdom(phronesis) he needed. This change of focus, from Homers Gods living on Olympus, to an inner voice, was also linked to the Socratic complaint about Homer and his depiction of the Gods as engaging in unethical actions. This shift in focus, for Socrates, was part of his search for the principles that communities need to reason their way to the telos of the good spirited flourishing life. Aristotle elaborated upon the examined life by including in his contemplative life, an account of the logos of Poetics, and the importance of plot, character, thought, language, melody, and spectacle. The plot of a tragedy, Ricoeur claims, is the “soul” or “telos” of tragedy, and he further claims that mimesis and muthos are equivalent ideas in this context. It is difficult to understand his point here, but its seems connected to his claim that the narrating of events, and the enacting of events in drama, are in some sense the “same”. The fictional enactment of events requires the temporal structure of a narrative in which the beginning necessarily “causes” the middle which in turn necessarily gives rise to an end. In this fictional process we take pleasure in the recognition of images for what they are: a recognition of the “universal intent” of the dramatist. Aristotle clearly differentiates historical narrative from poetic narratives in terms of the difference between the ordering of particular events and the universal intent of a drama in which there is a catharsis of emotions in relation to the reversal of fortune of the major. character(s) Unhappiness is a key moment in this process that is evaluated in terms of diké( getting what one deserves). The catharsis of the Spectator involves the recognition of the role of The Good and the True in what has happened and the inevitability of what has happened is recognised in relation to a set of circumstances.

Ricoeur interprets Aristotle dialectically when he links the processes internal to the composed work to what he calls the “external” role of the spectator in the process of catharsis. Cognition, imagination and feeling are all “at play” here and perhaps the idea he presupposes of “recognition” is not a sufficient characterisation of the way in which knowledge(epistemé) and areté are constitutive of the complex composition we are presented with.

June 26, 2022October 7, 2022

Essay 1 on Ricoeur’s “Three volume series on “Time and Narrative”

The Clock Tower at Cliveden House by Steve Daniels is licensed under CC-BY-SA 2.0

Augustine is famous for his sceptical rehearsal of various answers to the aporetic question “What is Time?” Ricoeur attempts to sum up what was achieved :

“Augustine’s inestimable discovery …reducing the extension of time to the distension of the soul.”(P.21)

This, to some extent, is reminiscent of the Kantian account of time which we know relates to activity of the faculty of Sensibility, but a more detailed look at Kant’s position here will reveal that there is no “dogmatic” reduction of the extension of time to the so-called distension of the soul . Instead we find in Kant, a nuanced account of the interplay of the role of movement or change in the external world and and the measurement of such movement or change. Indeed there is much in the Kantian account to suggest that he was committed to the Aristotelian essence-specifying definition of time:

“The measurement of motion in terms of before and after.”.

An illustration of the Kantian position can be seen in his example of the boat moving downstream on a river:

“I see a ship move downstream. My perception of its lower position follows upon the perception of its position higher up in the stream, and it is impossible that in the apprehension of this appearance the ship should first be perceived lower down in the stream and afterwards higher up.”(Immanuel Kants Critique of Pure Reason, A 192)

The real motion of the ship is what is being measured, and that cannot be reduced to any “distension” of the soul, even if the unity of the representations of the soul is irrevocably an inner phenomenon. In the above example, the relation of the representations is in accordance with a rule necessarily connecting the representations. Kant further elaborates upon this by contrasting the above activity with that of the perceptual activity connected with a large house from a point of view where the whole house requires a number of representations in order to be perceived completely. In the case of the succession of representations of the house, this succession is an arbitrary one, and the reversibility of these representations is possible without the internal structure of the perception being threatened with collapse. Kant claims:

“In conforming with such a rule there must lie in that which precedes an event the condition of a rule according to which the event universally and necessarily follows…..The event, as the conditioned, thus affords reliable evidence of some condition and this condition is what determines the event.”(A 193-4)

The resemblance of the above form of reasoning, to that which we encounter in Aristotelian hylomorphic theory of principles and first principles, is striking. In the hylomorphic theory of change there is reference to a “totality of conditions”, which include the infinite nature of the media of change(space, time, matter), 4 kinds of change, 4 causes of change,3 principles of change and the powers or capacities of a soul involved in the experience of this change, e.g. Sensibility. Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic is a significant elaboration upon this already complex theory:

“In whatever manner and by whatever means a mode of knowledge may relate to objects, intuition is that through which it is in immediate relation to them, and to which all thought as a means is directed. But intuition takes place only insofar as the object is given to us. This again is only possible, to man at least, insofar as the mind is affected in a certain way. The capacity(receptivity) for receiving representations through the mode in which we are affected by objects, is entitled sensibility. Objects are given to us by means of sensibility, and it alone yields us intuitions, they are thought through the understanding, and from the understanding arise concepts. But all thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.”(A19)

The hylomorphic character of the above text becomes more evident in following remarks in this Transcendental Aesthetic section which refer to sensations as the matter and the rule which orders sensation as the form of appearances. This “form”, Kant argues:

“must lie ready for the sensations a priori in the mind, and so must be considered apart from all sensation.”(A20)

Furthermore, Kant adds, in Aristotelian spirit:

“The science of all principles of a priori sensibility, I call Transcendental Aesthetic.”(A21)

From Aristotle’s perspective this form of kowledge would fall into the category of Theoretical Science, e.g. Metaphysics. Aristotle begins his work “Metaphysics”, by claiming that it is the aim of this queen of all sciences, to provide the first principles of knowledge for us “rational animals capable of discourse”, who desire to know. The work continues with a review of a number of aporetic questions which are meant to be defining of the scope and limits of this Philosophy of “First Principles” (or “First Philosophy”). Kantian metaphysics is also focussed on conditions or principles, and this is demonstrated in the Transcendental Aesthetic where the metaphysical conception of Time is presented in 5 sections. Time, insists Kant initially, is not empirically derived concept but rather it is:

“Only on the presupposition of time can we represent to ourselves a number of things as existing at one and the same time(simultaneously) and at different times(successively)”(A.30)

Secondly:

“Appearances may one and all vanish, but time( or the universal condition of their possibility) cannot itself be removed.(A31)

Thirdly,

“Time has only one dimension; different times are not simultaneous but successive(just as different spaces are not successive but simultaneous but successive)”(A.31)

Fourthly,

“Different times are but parts of one and the same time: and the representation which can be given only through a single object is intuition.”(A.32)

And finally, fifthly,

“The infinitude of time signifies nothing more than that every determinate magnitude of time is possible only through limitations of one single time that underlies it. The original representation, time, must therefore be given as unlimited.”(A.31-2)

In a section entitled “The Transcendental Exposition of the Concept of Time”, Kant further emphasises the fundamental role of time in all change, saying specifically that change and the concept of motion are conditional upon an a priori representation of time.

Time, then, is on Kant’s account, manifesting itself in our sensible attempts to measure change or motion, and it is, Kant insists, a form of inner intuition concerned with the intuition of ourselves and our inner state. Time is also a fundamental condition of the possibility of outer appearances. It is also important to note that in the Transcendental Aesthetic our concern is not with objects thought of conceptually, but rather “objects of our senses”(A.34). It is only when objects are subject to the categories of the understanding and the power of thinking(“I think”), that knowledge can then be organised by both analytical principles and transcendental logic. It is only in the special and general uses of understanding that logical principles can regulate the totality of conditions necessary for scientific thinking. It s in this context of explanation/justification that Kant then focuses upon the role of “judgement” in scientific discourse:

“Judgement is therefore the mediate knowledge of an object, that is the representation of a representation of it. In every judgement there is a concept which holds of many representations, and among them, of a given representation that is immediately related to an object. Thus, in the judgement “all bodies are divisible”, the concept of divisible applies to various other concepts but is here applied in particular to the concept of body, and this concept again to certain appearances that present themselves to us. These objects, therefore, are mediately represented through the concept of divisibility.”(A68-9)

Judgements are also logically ordered(via the special use of logic) by the categories of the understanding: an order that results in 12 logical types of judgement. These “categories of judgement” are indeed a very complex elaboration upon the so-called “categories of existence”, Aristotle formulated. In this account, the matter and form of knowledge are clearly distinguished, the former obtained via the senses, and the sensible faculty, and the latter via universal concepts and the principles of pure understanding. Logic and the power of reasoning as manifested in the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason, are seamlessly integrated into both the categories of the understanding and this logical system of judgements. Yet it has to be insisted that it is general, special and transcendental logic rather than dialectical logic which are the constitutive and regulative elements of any science employing these judgements and categories.

Augustine’s sceptical rehearsal of the aporetic questions he formulates in his investigations of time, are not metaphysical, in either Kantian or Aristotelian terms. He, rather launches a two pronged attack upon the humanistic rationalism manifested in both Aristotle and Kant. The first prong is in the form of an epistemological/phenomenological account of our experience of time, and the second in the form of a Philosophical Psychology that would also fall into the field of phenomenological investigations. Augustine asks how we can have access to the past which is no longer and a future which is not yet here, and instead of biting the bullet and saying that we do as a matter of fact know the past and the future which are both real, he focuses upon negation and the absence of the past and the future in order to create a field of primacy for the present (a solipsistic commitment to what can be known here and now). He then argues that memory and expectation are what is measured, rather than past or future “extended objects”. The condition required for such quantification is that the mind or soul be spatially conceptualised into the “circumstance” of an inner theatre of the imagination and its contents, which are then referred to as being located “in” this inner theatre. Scenes wax and wane on this inner stage, and it is this “logical space” Augustine appeals to with his idea of the distension of the soul, an idea which stretches over the present of the past, the present of the present, and the present of the future.

Augustine steers away from real external examples such as ships sailing downstream, whereas it is this kind of example the scientist Kant uses to generate the account he needs in his architectonic of sciences. Instead, Augustine prefers to use private soliloquy in which a psalm is being inwardly recited in order to generate a dialectical manifestation of expectation, attention, and memory. One moment passes away, and another moment waxes into the thought space, as expectation is transformed into memory in a dialectical process that Ricoeur describes in terms of a “living metaphor”. We are never given a precise account of the scope and limits of these “powers” in the Philosophical Psychology of Augustine. His aim, rather, appears to be one of phenomenologically describing the appearance and disappearance of these powers on a solipsistic inner stage in a context of presence and absence that resembles the example Freud referred to in his essay “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”. In Freud’s essay, a one and a half year-old boy missing his mother enacts out the scene with a cotton reel which he throws out of his cot uttering the word “Fort! and pulling it back in via its thread uttering the word “Da!”. This game of “gone!-here!” is a solipsistic exercise that might also be appreciated by many existentialist and phenomenological philosophers who appeal to the notion of “negation” in their accounts of mental mechanisms that regulate our thought processes. One important point to note in the above “presence-absence” game, is that nothing unifies the representations involved. Ricoeur points to how both metaphor and narrative have the task of unifying representations and might almost be considered as organising principles of the literary productive sciences.

The dialectical materialism of Hegel and Marx rest upon key moments of discordance, in which a thesis claiming the truth of something, is challenged by an antithesis claiming the truth of the negation of the thesis. The next stage in this process is a synthesis, in which certain elements of the thesis are integrated with certain elements of the antithesis. This looks a promising outcome, until we learn that this synthesis is merely a new thesis in disguise awaiting the arrival of another discordant antithesis. Scepticism has obviously won the day in this dialectical process, because, on this account, no theses can ever categorically possess the logical characteristics of universality and necessity. At best we are dealing with a judgment that falls into the category of the “hypothetical”. Kant and Kantians would, of course, reject both the scepticism and dogmatism of the Hegelian and Marxist positions on the grounds of the formulation of a critical rationalism which enables them to reject both the materialism and dualism of these times.

Augustine’s meditation on Time then takes a new turn when the idea of eternity is discussed again in terms of the present (that never ends). Our intellect, Augustine argues, contrasts our humanly lived time, with the idea of this never-ending present and a new dialectical argument begins to take shape. Eternity is linked to the eternity involved in words that express the Truth that never changes(P.29), but this is again immediately neutralised by a moment of negation, in which the idea of eternity introduces nothingness rather than being into our idea of Time.

June 22, 2022October 4, 2022

Review of Ricoeur’s “History and Truth”: Part 8 Anguish and Primary Affirmation

woman in gray tank top showing distress — Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

Fear, Ricoeur argues, has a determinate objective in contrast to the object of anguish which is contrastingly indeterminate. Furthermore Anguish threatens, not just a part of me, as may be the case with fear, but the self in its totality–the threat in this context is to the freedom of the self. Wittgenstein in his work “Philosophical Investigations” distinguishes between the cause and object of fear, and he appears here to conceive of “cause” in terms of a causal stimulus that prompts a response from the sympathetic nervous system. The cause is linked to an effect by the observational knowledge we have of their relation: whereas actions precipitated by anguish appear to be connected to reasons that we possess non-observational knowledge about.

Anguish is a phenomenon that occurs at various levels including at the vital level of life and death. Ricoeur argues that death is not implied by life but is rather related to some external cause which threatens: a cause which I witness empirically(observationally) in the death of others who are permanently absent from our common life-arenas. Ricoeur argues, somewhat mysteriously, that the form of knowledge we are concerned with in this case, is “abstract”, presumably because “reasoning is involved:

“All men die, therefore I, too”(P.289)

The death of an acquaintance, friend, or family member is, he claims, “internalised”. I then anticipate my own absence in all my life arenas in a non-intellectual non-cognitive spirit of anguish. A Freudian analysis of the movement from the fear of my own death to the knowledge that I too must die involves the mechanism of sublimation which in turn is related to a substitute form of satisfaction that removes the anxiety or anguish from the resulting act of judgement. This process is no easy transition for the agent concerned as psycho-analytical therapy clearly demonstrates. The more natural mechanism psychoanalytical patients engage in, is that of the repression of the awareness of ones own mortality. Heidegger characterised this phenomenon as fleeing away from the fate of ones death. Such repression or fleeing prevents more authentic relations to ones death such as we encounter in the Socratic sublimation of death into something good, something free from anxiety and anguish but at the same time intimately connected to the holistic worth and dignity of man. In the case of Socrates, the fact that he was , as the Bible put the matter “full of years”(three score years and ten), obviously contributed to the acceptance by Socrates of his own unjust fate.

Existentialism and Phenomenology in their different but related ways question this classical account, and in the case of the former we are invited to characterise our relation to our deaths in terms of an ambiguity connected to the fundamental contingency of having been born. Such ambiguity incorporates:

“The non-necessity of having once been born, thus the anguish of death, the primal anguish that eats away at my being-in-the-world is not completely immanent to my existence…… when death is here, you are no longer: when you are here, it hasn’t yet arrived.”(P.290)

Apparently my totality as a whole is threatened by anguish which is then transcended by “reasons for living”, which are also “reasons for dying”(P.291) This reasoning is Hegelian, an exercise in dialogical logic in which consciousness is both contingent , fragile, and associated with the notion of negation, which Ricoeur characterises as the “nothingness of freedom”. This idea of freedom is anguished over abandonment, and also possessed of a will to live that manifests itself in an upsurge of projects directed at a future that could make history. The will, so far as Kant is concerned, expresses itself in maxims for action which can both be the source of good and evil. For Kant, but not for Ricoeur, Hope is the organising idea for lives thrown into an arena where the choices of others and indeed ones own choices can bring misfortune upon oneself and others. Ricoeur embraces a notion of “dialectical hope” which does not surmount this chaos or reconcile one stoically to the misfortunes of life, but rather is offered as a “consolation”—being as it is associated with “anguish”, “until the last day”(P.304).

The question of negation and the finitude of my being, which evidences itself in ones perceptual relation to the world and ones moods, are taken up in the final essay of this work:”Negativity and Primary Affirmation”. This finitude has powers that are expressed in potentialities in the form of “I can” and these powers, Ricoeur argues, can be summarised in terms of the concept of “character”. This idea is linked to the “tragedies” of want and suffering, and can become the subject of an account in which these wants and sufferings can be evaluated by a character taking up a position, making a stand on the ground of his powers. Yet it is not a Greek analysis of character or the human psuche we will encounter in these reflections, but rather a phenomenological excursion into the realm of meaning in which negation and negativity appear to find a natural home. Kant is evoked in this reflection on the nature of value which, it is argued implies the absence of what is valued. What is not acknowledged, however, is the role that reason and understanding plays in the Kantian account. Rather the emphasis is placed on the Hegelian idea of “recognition” of the perspective and value of “the other”. On this account discourse has a negative structure in which the dread of death is embedded, and the question arises over a differentiation between what is objective, and what can be “described” in existential and phenomenological analyses. The conclusion of this reflection on meaning, point of view, and the will to live, is that the negativity referred to above is :

“not an immediate negation, but rather a negation of negation.”(P.318)

Sartre is invoked in the context of this discussion and a reference is made to an analysis of imagination in which it is claimed:

“The imagination which nihilates the whole of the real for the benefit of absence and the unreal.”

Freedom, on the Sartrean account, is not conceived of in Kantian terms, where freedom is characterised in terms of the power of a being to act to bring about what is real. Sartre’s account appeals rather to a notion of “nothingness”, that is discontinuous with the ontological comprehension of Being. Ricoeur appeals here to Anaximander who, it is claimed, maintained that being has a dialectical structure and linked to what Ricoeur terms a “primary affirmation”(P.327), and this in turn is linked with the ambiguous structure of the negation of negation. This requires a Philosophy of Nothingness which is:

“The transition from things to being”(P.328)

In this reflection the ancient Greek ideas of “form” and “arché” are discarded in favour of an act of existence connected more to anguish than to the eudaimonia of the Greeks or the eschatological hope of Kant. Mans questioning of the being of being or the origin of origin entails, on Ricoeur’s argument, that we can negate the principle of Being not by claiming as Plato did that the form of the Truth flows from the form of the Good, but rather by insisting that knowledge does not have a categorical structure, by claiming, that is, that existence is both particular , contingent, and ambiguous in its nature. On this account every question raised potentially leads to another question. This is undoubtedly a sceptical position that in its attempts to avoid rationalism and materialism ends with a dualistic account:

“Ontology….is the common root of being in the sense of the factual and of being in the sense of value.”(P.326)

Aristotle’s conception of the philosophy of first principles is not directly reflected upon. The pre-Socratic Anaximander is the source of the view that being is “primordially dialectical”(P.327). What this amounts too is not just a denial of reason and its justified conclusions but also a denial of the categories of understanding and by implication a rejection of General and Special Logic: a logic that claims, for example, that the principle “all men are mortal” cannot be meaningfully contradicted because of its categorical and conceptual nature.

History on the Kantian account is regulated by the concepts of Hope and the worth and dignity of man, and by extension, his civilisations and cultures(in which his soul is writ large). The roles of the Good and the True are manifested in our historical texts in a way similar to, but different from the way in which these roles are manifested in our aesthetic works, in which there is, of course, a greater role for the imagination, the psychological process of recognition and the logic of the dialectic.

June 11, 2022October 4, 2022

Review of Ricoeur’s “History and Truth”: Part 7 The Problem of Universal Civilisation.

LThe Bodleian Library, Oxford by Chris Allen is licensed under CC-BY-SA 2.0

Ricoeur begins his essay by defining the problem, as he sees it, of “modern universal civilisation”:

“The problem is this: mankind as a whole is on the brink of a single world civilisation, representing at once a gigantic progress for everyone and an overwhelming task of survival, and adapting our cultural heritage to this new setting. To some extent, and in varying ways, everyone experiences the tension between the necessity for the free access to progress and, on the other hand, the exigency of safeguarding our heritage. Let it be said at the outset that my thought does not result from any contempt for universal modern civilisation: there is a problem precisely because we are under the strain of two different necessities both of which are pressing.”(P.271)

This is a fascinating introduction raising a whole host of further questions relating, firstly, to the correct way in which to characterise this “single world civilisation””(as a zone of comfort and security made possible by technology or as a Kantian Kingdom of ends or an Augustinian city of God?) Secondly , how does it go about safeguarding its heritage in the three very different case mentioned above. Thirdly, whether there is progress toward a kingdom of ends would be a very difficult matter for even the eagle-eyed study of history to establish, given Kant’s claim that the kingdom of ends lies at least one hundred thousand years in the future. Given that span of time there is space to accommodate what Arendt called a “terrible century”(the 20th century) without abandoning the Kantian philosophical conviction that progress is being made.

Ricoeur continues his reflection by intuitively focussing upon one of the major difficulties of conceiving perspicuously of our situation: the pretension of the spirit of science to endow civilisation with a universal character. Modern science appears to express itself best in terms of the consequences of its theory, namely technologically. This is not the case with Greek science in which the spirit of techné is connected to areté(doing the right thing in the right way at the right time). The use of epistemé in Greek science is also involved in the science of nature, but in a different way to the way in which it is in the ethical/practical context of explanation/justification of action. Ricoeur poses the question: “”is Science Greek in its origins and European, through Galileo, Descartes, Newton etc.” One immediate response to this question is to point out that Greek science had a more complex relation to Mathematics than its modern counterpart. It is common knowledge that both Plato and Aristotle and presumably also Socrates believed Mathematics to be a discipline whose basic “objects” are “images” and whose definitions are “explanations” of the nature of such images, e.g. a straight line is the shortest distance between two points”. The epistemé of Plato and Aristotle was not constituted by mathematical operations but rather by principles(arché) regulating activities ranging over, not images, but rather objects, causes and individual actions. The problem with the inclusion of Mathematics in the scope of Greek epistemé is that it relates only to the physical reality/substance that is most amenable to quantitative operations. This categorical assumption becomes, however problematic because quantifying actions for the purposes of forming images does not answer questions relating to actions that are not classificatory/descriptive, but rather explanatory/justificatory in nature. There appears to be a confusion of what-questions with why-questions in many attempts to introduce mathematics into domains of concern requiring other forms of explanation.

Machines, Ricoeur argues, are merely more sophisticated tools requiring more technical thought for their production and use. Universality, in the sphere of techné, means, he claims, that as soon as an invention appears in one place in the world it can be spread over the whole globe. This is one consequence of globalisation—an ethically-neutral form of cosmopolitanism: we support the whole world in principle, insofar as possessing mobile phones is concerned, but not atomic weapons of mass destruction. Ricoeur, in the context of this discussion prefers to ignore Kantian Cosmopolitanism and he claims, somewhat controversially, that the first philosopher to reflect upon the universality of the state was a in fact Hegel. He claims:

“Hegel is the first to have shown that one of the aspects of more rationality, and at the same time, of his universality, is the growth of a state which institutes laws and develops the means for their enforcement in the form of an administration.”( P.273)

Aristotle’s definition of practical rationality, and its fundamental connection to the creation and maintenance of laws in the city, is also being ignored in Ricoeur’s praise of Hegel. Ricoeur does, however, insightfully fixate upon the importance of the concept of power, and he claims that once a certain level of comfort and security is reached we see authoritarian power-structures transmute into democratic power-structures. There is a case to be argued, for the position that democratic power structures make the exercise of power more difficult and tenuous, and Ricoeur claims, again insightfully, that one possible response to such a state of affairs, is to attempt to personalise power. This fails to appreciate the Aristotelian position that the greater the number of people that there are involved in a discussion of an issue over which a decision has to be made, the better the quality of the decision.

Ricoeur, then, moves the discussion on to a consideration of what he calls somewhat paradoxically “the rationalisation of power”, which he believes is connected to the bureaucratic administration of a government function. This process of administration involves research and investigation into the possibility and consequences of particular issues related to potential government decisions. Such research and investigation takes place in a combined spirit of exploration/discovery, and explanation/justification. In the former context, we are dealing with hypothetical investigations and technological imperatives, and in the latter we are more concerned with the categorical relation of conditions to their unconditioned arché. Both processes aim to provide us with a global picture of the means to ends , the ends in themselves, and possible “good consequences”. In such governmental investigations, calculation of all forms takes pace in the combined spirit of exploration/discovery and explanation/justification. The former context focuses upon instrumental and technological imperatives guiding decision and reasoning -processes. The latter context, on the other hand, tends to focus on ethical/political categorical imperatives claiming both universality and necessity, in tribunals that resemble processes of justice more than experimental discussion groups attempting to come to agreements based upon hypotheticals.

Investigations into economical problems involve the quantification of economic events and their consequences. There is, in our modern era, a danger that economic matters dominate the political landscape, and economic means to political ends become the favoured form of “rationalisation”, thus eclipsing the ethical and political substantive arguments required by rational political actors, for whom the term “rationalisation” carries negative connotations. Ricoeur refers to the categorical idea of a good-in-itself, and basically uses a Kantian Cosmopolitan view in his discussion of the “dangers” confronting mankind when major shifts of values occur:

“But the massive access of men to certain values of dignity and autonomy is an absolutely irreversible phenomenon, a good-in-itself. We are witnessing the advance onto the world scene of great human masses who were heretofore silent and down trodden…..a growing number of men have the awareness of making their history, of making history: in tis sense we can say that these men are really joining the majority.”(P.276)

Hannah Arendt referred to the problem these masses caused in the rise of totalitarianism in her work “The Origins of Totalitarianism”. It was, she argued during the “terrible 20th century” when political parties failed to appeal to these “mass-interests”, that we witnessed the quick dissolution of old fragile democracies. This illustrates well what Ricouer goes on to say concerning the destruction of traditional values in the process of their “universalisation”. The destabilisation of nation states in this process of “universal” cosmopolitanism obviously brought with it hidden dangers for the whole world. Ricoeur suggests that even the creative nucleus of the great civilisations of the past may become a victim of such turbulent unstable change involving the political mobilisation of the masses. We have argued in our series of works entitled “A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness, and Action”, that the ancient Aristotelian-Kantian “platform” of value remains submerged in the wake of the tsunami of change that swept the world in the 20th century. This tsunami had been building in size for some time since the first of the new men, namely Descartes and Hobbes, unleashed their “new ideas” upon the masses. They were then followed by Hume, Rousseau, Hegel and their followers who also rejected the nucleus of Aristotelian-Kantian philosophising. Two new structures were being constructed by these new men in a “new spirit”, based firstly, on an obsessive methodology of science, and secondly, the methodology of Phenomenology. Ricoeur does not embrace the “movement of events” inspired by the new ideas of these new men: indeed he calls the movement threatening:

“by the spreading before our eyes of a mediocre civilisation which is the absurd counterpart of what I was just calling elementary culture. Everywhere throughout the world one finds the same bad movie, the same slot machines, the same plastic or aluminium atrocities, the same twisting of language by propaganda etc. It sees as if mankind, by approaching en masse a basic consumer culture, were also stopped en masse at a subcultural level.(P.276)

Ricoeur is relying on an idea of levels of culture similar to that implied by the Kantian distinction between civilisation and culture. The idea of the “personality” of a nation rooted in its past is also invoked, but this is not a part of the Kantian reasoning. Scientific, technical, and political rationality, Ricoeur argues, requires a transcendence of both existing traditions and “personality”, in the name of this modern en masse movement. Modern political “rationalisation” is of course not rationally or ethically grounded, as was the case with Ancient Greek or Kantian Political Philosophy. Modern political thinking, rather, is a more instrumentally based, “pragmatic” affair, where much effort and time is spent on the calculation of consequences and focussing on what is sometimes arbitrarily designated as “good consequences”. Rationality and its concern with an absolute good-in-itself, would be regarded by Ricoeur as the European “illusion”, that such a good is “universal”. The consequence of such reasoning is that the rational universal grounds which we Europeans use to distinguish reality from illusion (which include both Logic and Metaphysics). is also dismissed and disqualified on the grounds of both lacking “universality” and “necessity”.

Ricoeur then raises three questions:

What constitutes the creative nucleus of a civilisation?
Under what conditions may this creativity be pursued?
How is an encounter with different cultures possible?

In attempting to answer question one, Ricoeur refers to an ethico-mythical nucleus of a culture, and warns us against rational definitions of the kind we find embedded in the metaphysical positions of Aristotle and Kant. This would on the face of it appear to disqualify the possibility of adopting a universally necessary attitude to other cultures, e.g. as Kantian ends-in-themselves whose freedom and dignity(personality) should be respected. The discovery of other cultures where more particularistic attitudes prevail, e.g militaristic cultures, does not actually threaten any Kantian categorical imperative that we might use to judge such war-like societies–(what is the case is not logically equivalent to what ought to be the case).

Ricoeur calls upon evidence of clashes between cultures and primitive civilisations such as those reported in the studies of Levi-Strauss, in which these primitive civilisations find it almost impossible to assimilate the kinds of tools a culture uses, because their conception of time, space, and human relations will not allow an imaginative conversion to a consumer-comfort based form of life. The conclusion of this debate contains a reference to levels or layers which have to be phenomenologically disentangled, rather than rationally defined. Any phenomenological analysis, Ricoeur argues, must cut through to a core of basic images and symbols, which it is argued, rather surprisingly, can also be psychoanalytically described. The argument leads to a cul-de-sac in which it is maintained that the fundamental factor to consider here is that of difference–man is different to man as is evidenced by the fragmentariness of the different languages he speaks. One consequence of this kind of argumentation is that different contexts of civilisation cannot be artificially united by the unifying impulse of rationalism. Some civilisations, Ricoeur argues, will just not be able to assimilate the modern form of scientific rationality which requires a complex form of faith in which one can strive to lay nature bare to the scientific gaze whilst at the same time mysteriously embracing what is sacred to man(P.282). For Ricoeur, however, insofar as the relation to others are concerned, it is not rational respect for a categorical imperative that guides our principle based relations, but rather psychological functions such as sympathy and imagination. Aesthetics and the Arts are evoked and we are encouraged to consider the parallel of a character in a novel or theatrical play, in order to concretise what for him otherwise appear to be abstract relations appealing to a principle that he does not believe can be justified. Only a culture that uses creativity in the above way, is, Ricoeur argues, capable of giving meaning to the encounter with other cultures. We ought also to bear in mind, Ricoeur points out that our Greek, Hebrew, and Christian origins are not shared by many Eastern civilisations and the confrontation between very different kinds or origins has only just begun. It is also insisted in this connection that we do not possess a philosophy of History which is able to “resolve the problems of coexistence”(P.284) and this, we would maintain is because of the human totality, which Ricoeur refuses to acknowledge, may be a rationally constituted phenomenon.

May 24, 2022October 4, 2022

Review of Ricoeur’s “History and Truth”: Part 6–The Political Paradox.

soldier holding rifle — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

This essay is about the problematic relation between power and responsibility. The relationship of History to Power is a latent problem that is only briefly touched upon, but it is claimed, that power has no history, and this pitches us immediately into the Kantian domain of Philosophical Psychology in which it is maintained that the human will causes itself to act–this is its primary power! But this is not the end of the story, because the will on Kantian theory is subject to, firstly, the categories of the understanding and in this respect is self-causing. Secondly, the will is also related to Reason and its freedom to choose. Furthermore, in his Groundwork, Kant claims that this will is universally and necessarily good insofar as its acts are determined by the categorical imperative, which explains not just what we as a matter of fact do, but also what we ought to do, what we must do, given certain circumstances. We have, Kant argues, general duties and responsibilities to treat people as ends in themselves, and also particular duties such as “promises ought to be kept” and “Value the truth”. These two last ethical maxims are also political maxims in Kantian Political Philosophy which widens its scope of concern to generate universal human rights from the duties generated in the political arena. The government, Kant claims, has a duty to keep its promises and value the truth in the court of public opinion, but it also has economic duties to distribute benefits and burdens equally and ensure that the law protects land, possessions and work. A paradox can easily be set up by turning Kant upside down, as Hegel claimed to do in relation to the Critical Project. One can, for example, deny the truth of Kant’s idea of the good will insofar as government activity is concerned, and agree with Machiavelli that the way in which the Prince ought to rule is via the manipulation and deception of his subjects. Ricoeur has several times in previous essays suggested that there is inherent evil in the exercise of power by authorities, so, the choice to invoke Machiavelli in this discussion about the nature of power comes as no surprise.

In this essay Ricoeur compares capitalist and socialist forms of government in terms of an ideal democratic organisation that rules in the name of historical rationality which cannot, it is argued, be reduced to any form of economic argumentation. The paradox at issue for Ricoeur is:

“that the greatest evil adheres to the greatest rationality, that there is political alienation because polity is relatively autonomous.”(p.249)

Ricoeur also quotes the opening of Aristotle’s ” Politics”(P.249):

“Every state is a society of some kind, and every society, like all forms of association, is instituted with a view to some good; for mankind always acts for an end which is esteemed good.”(Book 1, 1-3 Trans Jowett, B.,)

Aristotle is one of the first systematic critical rationalists and would find the view that rationality is the greatest evil, paradoxical. For Aristotle mans rationality is an essential potentiality he possesses, a potentiality which actualises under certain complex conditions. Man aims at the good, and he aims to know, and rationality is involved in both of these “ends”. He is, according to Aristotles essence-specifying definition a “rational animal capable of discourse”, and it is the “form” of being a language-user that transforms his “form” of animality(psuche). This is part of the self- actualisation process that uses the “material” of being a language-user in the knowledge-acquisition process and in the practical process of becoming a political being. If man did not, for example, live in a polis and engage himself in the process of surviving in a state of nature he would, on Aristotle’s view, revert to a primitive existential state in which neither knowledge nor ethics/politics would be important in such a life. The goods aimed at in such a state would be those of the beast.

Kant would also question Ricoeur’s proposed identification of rationality with evil. On the Kantian account, authorities that are tyrannical are perversions of the good will(the unconditioned condition presupposed in Kantian ethics): they are pathological phenomena which are the consequence of the perversion of the idea of the good-in-itself. The autonomy of what Ricoeur calls the “polity” consists, for Kant, in a concern for “serving the community”: a concern grounded in the requirement of the categorical imperative that one act in such a manner as to treat people as ends-in-themselves. This is a form of action which requires the formation of maxims possessing the characteristics of universality and necessity. In other words, if we are evaluating the phenomenon of tyranny, we are dealing with a pathological consequence of the perversion of the good-in-itself. Classical scholars will recall in the context of such discussions Glaucon’s demand aimed at Socrates, in the early sections of the Republic, that any definition of justice must meet the requirements of both being good in its consequences and good-in-itself.

Ricoeur also refers to Rousseau in his attempt to further articulate the the concept of “polity”. The Social Contract, it is argued, is presupposed in the relation between political authority and those affected. The social contract is a virtual pact that occurs principally at the founding moments of Nations: moments which inevitably include elements of violence. With this idea, the focus is turned away from the duties and responsibilities of authority, and toward the “consent” of those affected. In this context the relation is viewed in the light of the consequences of historical events. The question that is then posed is, “Do the citizens of a nation accept that conditions of the contract have been fulfilled by their government?” Much, of course, depends upon the nature of the conditions of the contract— are they for example, fundamentally ethical, or are they merely economic conditions favouring one class over another or one group of people over another(believers over non-believers). In other words: Is there alienation of large groups or minorities as a consequence of the policies and laws proposed and enacted by the government in question?

Ricoeur claims paradoxically in the context of this discussion that Rousseau is Aristotle(P.254). The argument for this strange identification of thinkers from very different “schools” of thought(classical v romantic) is that Rousseau’s terms “pact” and “general will” are in essence identical with Aristotle’s hylomorphic terms “nature” and “end” (telos). This “identification” depends on detaching teleological explanation/justification from material, efficient and formal explanations/justifications, which, on Aristotle’s account, ought not to occur if one is intent upon systematic explanations/justifications that meet the rational criteria of knowledge in general and political knowledge in particular. Rousseau’s appeal, for example, to “amour propre” was a denial of the importance of rationality in true Romantic tradition and an attempted celebration of the idea of man as a compassionate animal corrupted by his society. Man is born innocent and free, but enslaved by evil societies. For Rousseau it was Robinson Crusoe that best manifested mans original and innocent relation to nature and himself. Aristotle as a matter of fact was disliked by Rousseau, and Aristotle in his turn would have seen in Robinson Crusoe a being enslaved by Nature, a being waiting to be freed by the forces of civilisation. For Rousseau man is dominated by a sentiment which he calls “amour propre” from which flows, firstly, a tendency to favour himself over others and secondly, latent ideas of inequality which allow destructive activities performed under the banner of “honour”. Government, in the view of Rousseau, ought to be based on the general will of the people which the rulers have a duty to take into consideration in their governing activities. Unfortunately the “model” or “pattern” for this form of rule is, Rousseau claims, to be found in Rome or Sparta. In such societies we encounter a military spirit and “code of honour” which historically have had problematic relations to the ideas of justice and freedom. Rousseau, we ought to recall is a product of the “ancien regime”: a regime that did not sense the growing frustration of its citizens, did not, that is, concern itself with the “general will”. Aristotle’s view of the Spartan society was far less favourable than that of his pupil, Plato. Spartans were rumoured to have hated Philosophy and we know they admired and respected “honour-loving” heroes like Achilles and Hector. The suggestion by the Athenians that the times they were a changing and that Socrates and his love of Philosophy was the new ideal for heroism would have been ridiculed in Sparta.

The crucifixion of Jesus,(cf. the death of Socrates) was, of course an act of civil authorities and there are arguments to be made that in both of these cases, power was being exercised outside the good intentions of the law, i.e. irrationally. These were not the violent acts of founding a new order, but rather acts designed to protect civic and religious authorities from powerful criticism. Ricoeur refers to Marx and the claim that the State is an instrument of class violence in the name of the controlling forces, is put in relation to Stalins rule, which represented the dictatorship of the proletariat. History has testified to the destructive forces that were released during this period of Soviet History. Stalin rejected the “order” of “truth” and the “order” of “the law” in the process of the militarisation of the minds of the Soviet people.

Ricoeur claims that liberalism was born in the eighteenth century:

“The philosophers of the eighteenth century devised the term liberalism which no doubt goes beyond the destiny of the bourgeoisies…In its profound intention, liberal politics comprised an element of universality, for it was adjusted to the universal problematic of the State, beyond the form of the bourgeois state.”(P.267)

There is no place for any form of the militarisation of minds in the enlightenment liberalism we encounter in the Political Philosophy of Kant. On the contrary, War is the enemy of civilisation in general and education in particular, in Kantian thought. For Kant, man both understands from a purely rational point of view that war is an evil but as if this was not sufficient he has also experienced first hand the horrors and devastations of wars. For Kant, therefore, any declaration of war must be an abuse of power which ignores the knowledge we all have in relation to an activity that always has unintended consequences and even when it achieves its military aims only does so at huge cost.

Ricoeur claims that Stalinism was overthrown by justice and truth and presumably he means that these ideas were valued by the opponents of Stalin: opponents which included intellectuals, writers and artists. The end result of the successful removal of Stalin was not, as we know, the creation of a liberal democracy manifesting its general will in the creation of political parties, free elections and a professionally run parliamentary system uncorrupted by special interests. Ricoeur wonders whether the liberal democratic system is fundamentally liberal or whether it is a residue of bourgeois politics, merely a variation on an old corrupt and violent theme.. Arendt in her work on Totalitarianism noted the ease with which political parties were dissolved by mass popular movements in the twentieth century, and the question remains whether once this has happened to a nation, whether political parties can ever re-emerge in a democratic form. Ricoeur points out that liberal political parties must be “liberal” in a wider sense than bourgeois economic liberalism. They must, that is, reflect ongoing free discussions in a society. Ricoeur also acknowledges the importance of the Kantian idea of freedom which, he argues is the central “problem” of politics.

Category: Philosophical Publications and Book Reviews

Review of Ricoeur’s “Time and Narrative” Volume 2: Tales about Time–Essay no 10

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