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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?”
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Action lies at the heart of work and perhaps also the origin of Language. The first insights into the origins of language come down to us from Protagoras who claimed that the 4 roots of language are:
commanding
questioning
answering
wishing or requesting
These are activities that are intimately related to the following grammatical moods of language:
imperative
interrogative
indicative
conditional
subjunctive
Grammarians claim that the above moods or modes reflect a speakers view of the ontological character of the event/activity that is being referred to. Actions of various kinds are also a part of the account we are given by Julian Jaynes who investigated the origins of language in the light of his brain research and familiarity with Greek Culture, as well as with the more modern study of Physical and Social Anthropology. His interest extended to the origins of consciousness, and he claimed that primitive man was not conscious in the way that we are. He possessed a relatively complex language which, during times of stress, when questions arose that could not be answered, (or difficult to solve problems arose in work contexts), a voice from the right hemisphere of the brain emerged in response to the activity in the left and provided an answer or a solution. Jaynes called this the bicameral mind(a brain in which language was located bilaterally in both hemispheres). With the emergence of Consciousness ca 1200 BC, Language became centred in the left and we became left-dominant insofar as language was concerned. Bicameral man, then, was grammatically steered by interrogatives and imperatives when there could be no recourse to the other “categories”(in situations of stress, for example).
The interrogative and indicative moods in combination with each other, when developed to a sufficient degree of complexity, are important to our epistemological concerns. Plato and Aristotle were not, of course, bicameral men but possessed a highly complex critical form of self-consciousness. Aristotle, in his Metaphysics, pointed out the importance of mans desire for knowledge, and he also referred to the important distinction between “what” questions(indicative of facts) and “why” questions(providing explanatory and justificatory answers). The life of contemplation which Aristotle recommended is largely composed of all of the above grammatical modes. Our ethical concerns are related to the imperatives connected to “The good”, the account of which, provides the necessary context of explanation/justification so important to us. The optative mode is also important in this context because it provides us with answers to “what” questions relating to what we ought to do, or what ought to occur. These grammatical “cases” serve also as demonstrations of the categorical difference that exists between is-statements expressive of the fact of the matter(the truth of the matter), and ought-statements, that rely on ones own activity/actions and the activity/actions of others in the process of transforming the hope that something occur into its actualisation in reality. It was perhaps partly such grammatical considerations that helped to convince Plato and Aristotle to philosophically distinguish the “True”(Metaphysics) from “The Good”(Nichomachean Ethics/Politics). This issue arose again during 20th century Analytical Philosophy when debates over the logical relations between is-and ought statements resulted in objections to attempting to derive ought-statements from is-statements as well as attempts to reduce ought statements to is-statements. Both Aristotle and Kant would align themselves with these objections to naturalistic fallacies as part of their argumentation against positivism and all forms of materialism.This categorical distinction, it ought to be pointed out, whilst expressive of the “many meanings of being” thesis, is not pluralistic in the anti-rational sense embraced by Ricoeur. Rational principles such as the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason prevail over all regions of discourse and are essential elements of our understanding and reason. Ought-arguments resulting in specific ought-conclusions follow the same logical principles of deduction as arguments cast in indicative modes.
Against the background of these considerations, simple technical work clearly situates itself both in the grammatical spheres of the imperative and optative/subjunctive cases. The more complex this work is, the more knowledge will be required to perform it, and this may in turn require, as part of the learning process, theoretical study of facts and the related explanations/justifications. The simpler the form of work, the more conceivable it is that the learning process can occur by imitating and doing alone.
Ricoeur appeals to the theory of Janet’s which claims that the first words of man, the finite being, can be characterised as a kind of “imperative cry” which detaches itself from action and assists in the initiation phase of activity. This cry, it is argued, emotionally connects the word to the work that awaits. Ricoeur characterises this linguistic expression as a “plan”(P.200) once it has become part of what he terms “praxis”–indicating a Marxist view of both word and work:
“..the spoken word is, in a sense, and an authentic sense, an annex of the enterprises of transforming the human milieu by the human agent. This fundamental possibility justifies a Marxist interpretation of culture in which work is seen as the power which reorganises the full scope of the human.”(P.200)
The anti-rationalist tendency of modernism does not of course permit recourse to the rationalist works of Plato, Aristotle, or Kant, and this in turn reduces the alternatives available, but choosing to rest ones case on an unholy alliance of Marxism with Christian Theology, as Ricoeur does, is surely problematic. Both Marxism and Christianity mutually shun each other for good reason. The rationalistic response to this unholy alliance would be to see in it just one more attempt to resurrect materialistic, dualistic perspectives that had been demolished twice in the history of Philosophy first by Aristotle and then by Kant. Marxists characterise religion as “opium for the masses” who cannot afford to buy real opium , and this was an interesting statement to make by the Philosopher who hoped that the mass-movements (which he was helping to create) would rise in revolution against their imagined repressors and take control of the means of production: all in the name of praxis which took the form of economic materialism. Jesus may well have stated that it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven(De Civitate dei), but the Marxist materialistic societies would have seemed to Jesus to resemble Babylon(De Civitate Terrana), an earthly “work” or faithless creation by men possessing “lost souls”—men who would not fare well when the Last Day or Day of Judgement came. This dualistic view of the body and soul and the above tale of two cities would fall into the realm of mythology for both hylomorphic and critical Philosophers : a mythology which failed to recognise the role of rationality in our Cultures, a role responsible for our just laws and the freedom of our citizens.
Embedding Logos in such materialistic or dualistic contexts where language is either human praxis or the word of God, fails to understand its relation to Consciousness, thought, or truth functional normative rationality. For Kant, man is engaged in a normative project which is directed by the categorical imperative, which in turn has faith in principles that connect ones human “work” with a free flourishing life. Work, for Kant, is also driven by the hypothetical imperatives that focus on the means to ones ends, rather than on the ends-in-themselves. This civilisation-building work proceeds largely in accordance with “conditional” judgements such as “If you wish to live comfortably then you ought to find work”. In this context causality reigns, and the principles connecting the conditions with what is conditioned are causal. Culture-constituting categorical imperatives, on the other hand, focus on the unconditional grounds that possess rational connections to that which they make possible. We can see from this comparison that categorical unconditional judgments differ from hypothetical conditional judgements in a number of ways but perhaps the major distinguishing feature between the two forms of judgement relates to the faculty of origin for these judgements. Categorical judgments originate in the faculty of Reason and employ General Logic whereas hypothetical judgments originate in the faculty of the understanding which employs “special” logic. The latter insofar as it employs causal principles is calculating the most appropriate means to a given end. The former explains and justifies ends-in-themselves in terms of reasons and the deductive form of argumentation.
Language, according to Freud, was a means of bringing preconscious and unconscious “material” into the domain of consciousness, which Freud characterised as a vicissitude of Instinct. The way in which language is used will partly be determined by grammatical rules which will differ for each of the 5 cases referred to above(imperative, interrogative, indicative, conditional, subjunctive) which in their turn are related to the Protagorean activities of commanding, questioning, answering, wishing or requesting.
The use of language in religious activity will of course, differ, depending upon whether we are considering the Word of God using imperative and indicative language in the scriptures, or rather considering the parishioner praying(wishing- requesting) for guidance or salvation. This relation between God and the parishioner is reminiscent of the relation between an authority ruling unconditionally over its subjects, and those subjects which to some extent may be neither free nor autonomous, and may therefore be suffering the effects of an unjust undemocratic society (in the hope of a better form of existence upon the advent of Judgment Day). If the suffering continues with no end in sight it is just a matter of time before a Reformation or a more serious secular revolution dissolves the tenuous relation between God and the faithful. This, it needs to be pointed out, is not the relation either Aristotle or Kant possessed in relation to their religions. For both these philosophers, God was an idea, an arché or principle, explaining or justifying certain truths and norms.
The most interesting use of religious language Ricoeur points to in his work “The Symbolism of Evil”(Trans Buchanan, E., Boston, Beacon Press, 1963) is the confession made by a “guilty consciousness” of his sins. This is of interest to Ricoeur because it is an utterance of man about himself. The source of the utterance, Ricoeur claims, is the sympathetic imagination. The language involved in this activity is a mix of grammatical cases which express an emotional matrix of suffering, fear, anguish and the experienced unworthiness because the sacred bond between man and his God has been ruptured. This kind of “alienation” is a far more complex matter than that which concerns Marx, involving as it does, something more than economic “exploitation” in the external world but rather the peril of the soul in a sacred sublime form of life.
In the confession there is, of course, a possible wish or request to be put on the right path(the path of righteousness) and there are also indicative statements relating to the power of God in such matters. The secular view of prayer struggles to understand the meaning or point of the activity, and this might even place this view at odds with those philosophers who relate to their God as some form of principle. The relation of Aristotle and Kant to their Gods would appear to reject “worshipping” the sacred in any “confessional” form but there is nevertheless respect for what Wittgenstein would have called the religious “form of life”, which he sympathised with. Prayer can of course also be either an expression of suffering(similar to a cry of frustration) or even a reflective voice of consciousness that has the consequence of urging itself toward “The Good” in a life filled with problems. This latter form of prayer might take a philosophically reflective form and calmly, in an interrogative mood, pose questions about the meaning of life and expecting answers from the preconscious system of the mind–thus combining the indicative and interrogative modes of language at the expense of the wishing/requesting mode.
Ricoeur maintains that it is the imperative function of language that is the closest to the activity of work. According to him this function remains aloof from the process of living. He points out that imperatives initiate a “specific action” which is not aiming at the “production” of anything, but aims rather at influencing an outcome via the actualisation of an intention(thus making the thought involved with the intention true). Ricoeur refuses this last Kantian appeal to Truth and Knowledge and prefers to remain in his reflection at the level of “influence” in relation to the “meaning” of language. If we are to believe Frege, language is constituted of both sense and reference: applying this to the imperative form of language suggests that when we understand an imperative, part of that understanding transcends the sense of the words, and takes us to their reference. It might be that it is this dimension of reference and truth that differentiates an imperative from the wish/request mode, i.e. the wish/request form may involve removing the “natural” human authority that Aristotle pointed out in his ethics is related to the idea of “The Good”. Insofar as these words in imperative form make reference to Principles(e.g. Promises ought to be kept) they then become self-explanatory or self-justifying. Imperatives of this form thus range over what-questions and why-questions. There is, as Ricoeur emphasised, no technological or merely causal relation relation between words of this form and the result produced because, as Anscombe pointed out, an intention is specifically related to the why-question and a reason for acting rather than any cause. This form cannot be justified by the principles of the productive sciences, but rather require an appeal to the principles of the theoretical and the practical sciences. The spectre of Wittgenstein’s essence-specifying grammatical definitions arises in the context of this discussion, and we should recall his final justification at the end of the chain of what and why-questions, e.g. “This is what we do!”. Wittgensteins investigations into the uses of language and grammatical justifications are not empirical investigations but resemble more the kind of investigation we find in the Critical philosophy of Kant which Wittgenstein specifically acknowledged as an appropriate “method”. There is also an interesting similarity of the Wittgensteinian investigations, (into the concept of “forms of life”), to Aristotelian hylomorphic investigations into psuche.
Ricoeur mysteriously claims that it is the optative mode of language which is related to what he terms the fundamental act of evaluation. This view contrasts of course with the Kantian claim that it is the imperative “category” that constitutes evaluation in the ethical sphere of value. Our free lives pose many ethical problems for us, which Kant claims are best resolved by duty-steered imperatives that may constrain those “wishes which tempt us to favour our desires over the needs of others. He links self-questioning and the interrogative mode with the optative mode, and there is a suggestion of the influence of Heidegger and his definition of Dasein( a being for whom its very being is in question). Ricoeur claims that the question at issue is answered partly in the dialectic of the word of man in the realm of meaning, and partly in the work of man in the larger realm of Culture. In his earlier works, Ricoeur defined human existence in terms of the effort to exist and the desire to be. In this essay, “Work and the Word” Ricoeur returns to his Marxist analysis of work in terms of “alienation” and “objectification” thus stripping work of its cultural significance. Ricoeur claims that it is the task of Philosophy in Culture to offset “objectification” by a reflective questioning process.(P.213). This needs to be done if the discussion is to be lifted above the base-level of the “economics” of work, which is largely a reductive exercise in which the use of money, for example is regarded as a “fetish”. Ricoeur praises utilitarianism and technical education, and also the more disinterested role of the University in Culture, and concludes his investigation with the banal claim that both word and work are needed for the purposes of civilisation. For Kant, as we have noted above, it is the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason(general and special logic) and the categories of the understanding which include the categorical imperative that constitute Culture which Kant regarded as higher form of communal life than “civilisation”. The latter is, in Kant’s view driven by hypothetical imperatives which strive for homeostasis and happiness(which for Kant was the principle of self-love in disguise). The hypothetical imperatives of civilisation are of course important for the meeting of our needs for safety and security but only categorical imperatives and the principles related to them can sufficiently answer the aporetic questions raised in relation to the being of our humanity or explain the inner awe and wonder we feel when we think about the moral law within us. For Aristotle, the attachment to a dogma such as Marxism, would constitute a very limited realm of value that concerned itself only with the external world and ones basic desires. The values of the body and the soul, and their intimate relation, is bypassed in Marxist theory where men become mechanical parts in a materialistic system aiming at “production”, This, on a hylomorphic view, would constitute a very limited conception of “The Good” mentioned in the Nichomachean Ethics. Marxist theory, from the point of view of Hylomorphic political theory, appears to have omitted consideration of the most important synthesis of the thesis of oligarchic values and the antithesis of democratic values. Aristotle called this synthesis constitutional politics, and attributed it to the value-system of the middle class: a value system embracing the contexts of exploration and explanation/justification that we find in the cultural activities of the theoretical, practical, and productive sciences. Amongst such values we are likely to find the idea of freedom, the idea of justice, and the idea of the importance of knowledge which for both Aristotle and Kant could be defined in terms of justified true belief. These ideas constitute our Culture which certainly sees the word to be a part of the “work” of meaning and part of the “work” of investigating the many meanings of being.
The Renaissance, Ricoeur argues, was the moment in History when the pluri-vocal nature of truth revealed itself. He overlooked the work of Aristotle in this judgement. The period of the Renaissance can of course be conceived of narrowly or more widely, either as the era between the medieval period and the modern period that can be dated with the fall of Rome in 1527, or the work of Descartes over a century later(1637). Adrian Stokes, a psychoanalytically inspired art critic, wrote about Renaissance Art from the perspective of a genre he named “QuattroCento Art”: a genre he characterised in terms of forms that emanated from the building and walls of Mother of Architecture which could also “encase” sculptures and paintings. For Stokes, a key term for the effect of art was “emblematic”, a concept which captured the essence of a process that converted the subjective into something objective. In this process an expression resulted in an external material object produced with the intention of being responded to and in the spirit of a humanistic telos.
Renaissance art therefore did strive for a unity of the human world via its intentions and technically produced objects, and it did this as part of a wider project of restoring the classical values of Ancient Greece that had been temporarily occluded by the engineering/military spirit of the Roman World. For Stokes there was a kinship between the mass-effect of stone, the “blossoming” of wall emblems, the sublimated depressive anxiety of the naked Michelangelo figures guarding the Medici tomb, the look of alerted resignation on the face of the Michelangelo Delphic oracle in the Sistine chapel. This is the kinship of ideas but it is also expressive of the objective humanism that we can find in the hurly burly of the cosmopolitan Shakespeare plays. This “spirit” was repressed by Descartes’ essentially private meditations and discourses in front of a Northern fireside in a study far from the madding Shakespearean crowds: a study that was home to the mathematicians paper and pencil. In the work of Descartes, technical solutions to technical problems such as designing weapons for the battlefield displaced the concerns of epistemé, diké , arché (and the concerns of the great-souled men of Ancient Greece). In the Cartesian coordinate system life-forms moved mechanically in space and time but consciousness lived a life of its own in the Cartesian account of the Cogito: a life embedded in the mechanical brain. This “modern” variation on Platonic dualism has deliberately distanced itself from Aristotelian hylomorphism and its thesis of the continuity of human life-forms with animal forms of life: a continuity regulated by the principles of psuche. Descartes led the Renaissance revival of the classical spirit right back into the dark labyrinth of the dark ages, resting his final case on theology and the argument that only God can guarantee that our life is not a dream we will soon awaken from.
It is not clear what Ricoeur means with the phase “pluralistic nature of truth” but the resemblances of his phenomenological position to that of Descartes are clear. This together with a clearly articulated anti-rationalist sentiment, which rejects the first principles of Aristotelian and Kantian Philosophy, leads one to the judgement that we are dealing with a “modern” theory of man that also rests its final arguments on theological grounds. According to Ricoeur, all attempts to search for the unity of Being is a temptation and an evil that ought to be avoided. This may be a reference to a view that medieval clerics and scholars have held, namely “God is one”, and this judgement often occurs in relation to a discussion of the holy trinity of God the father, God the son, and God the holy ghost. If this is the case then the judgement that this kind of attempt to unify different aspects of the divine must be something to avoid but it is not clear why.
The Kantian view of God is not essentially an epistemological or ontological view similar to the Cartesian view in which the idea theoretically guarantees that our experiences are real and not the figment of a dream. Rather, it is the practical/politically/ethically-rational idea of freedom that Kant focuses upon in order to support the hypothetical judgement “If you lead a worthy life then the life one leads will be a flourishing life.” Ricoeur would counter such reflections with the claim that rationality is only present in mans life in the form of a “wish for reason”, and he would further claim that this is a flawed response to the fundamental ambiguity of existence. This wish for reason is furthermore characterised as a lie, but Ricoeur never engages directly with the arguments of Kant and prefers to keep a respectable distance to Critical Philosophy insofar as the concepts of freedom and responsibility(and their connection) are concerned.
Kant’s view of Truth in his First Critique is essentially a formal account and insists upon acknowledging the impossibility of a general definition of Truth. He agrees that there must be a formal agreement of knowledge and its object but points out that objects concretely differ from one another and that consequently any definition will lack this important “material” component. This position also testifies to the hylomorphic character of Kantian reflections which demands a relation between form and matter that will be in accordance with the principles of explanation/justification (which one will find are implied by the definition of knowledge that both Kant and Aristotle accept, namely “Justified True Belief”). The two principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason together constitute the “arché of Kantian metaphysical reasoning. Insofar as we do concern ourselves with the content of our knowledge claims(its objects) the categories of the understanding would indeed appear to be pluralistic and partly constitutive of the ontological structure of the different objects we confront in reality. Here too, we find Kant using hylomorphic reasoning and designating the content of knowledge as its matter, which on hylomorphic theory, is organised by “forms” (justifying principles, laws). Truth therefore also has a “form” which relates to the principle of noncontradiction that Kant claims must be regarded as a negative criterion for Truth. The matter of knowledge, on the other hand, is firmly situated in a context of discovery/exploration whose purpose it is to acquire information. Logic, on this account, teaches us nothing about the content of knowledge. Rather it is the faculty of Sensibility, combining apriori and empirical intuitions, that constitutes the “material” awaiting possible conceptualisation in terms of the categories of the understanding. Kant, we know, insisted that intuitions without concepts are blind and concepts without intuitions are “empty”, thereby drawing attention to the importance of both these elements of experience. General logic cannot be used at this level without the risk of falling into what Kant called “dialectical illusion”(Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Trans Kemp Smith, N.,London, Macmillan, 1963, P.99). The categories of the understanding on the other hand, do concern themselves with what Kant termed “special logic” and the special principle of sufficient reason which is connected to the ontological structure of the categories. Kant also refers to the logic associated with this aspect of knowledge as “transcendental logic” which is specifically concerned with confining judgement within the scope and limits of experience. Here too, Kant warns us against generalising or using the categories outside these limits for fear of falling into illusion.
Whether or not one can regard the above Kantian view as a philosophical development of the Renaissance revelation of the pluralistic nature of truth remains an open question. One possible answer to this question consists in acknowledging the hylomorphic or Aristotelian influence in Kant’s work which carries with it a commitment both to the definition of knowledge as “justified true belief”(Aristotle begins his Metaphysics with the statement that we all desire to know) as well as a metaphysical commitment to the many meanings of being. In the light of this answer, it could be argued that if Kant is a hylomorphic philosopher this would in its turn constitute an elaboration upon the Renaissance aim of restoring the classical humanistic spirit of Ancient Greece. The special innovation of Kant was to consolidate the “home” for philosophy as a subject , namely in a university system that was at the same time operating on a principle of specialisation(probably on the model of the guild system). One important point to make in this context is that in the works of Aristotle and Kant, Reason is not merely a “wish” but rather a faculty which together with the faculty of understanding performs a regulative function with respect to the desire in general and wishing in particular. Desire and wish in the case of both Aristotle and Kant interact with the imagination. Another important question to ask is related to the extent to which one philosophically conceives of the abiding influence of Ancient Greece in our Culture(with special reference to Plato and Aristotle). Aristotle we know had great respect for his teacher and this respect was probably to a large extent mutual. Historically, however, probably because of the role of the Church, and its preference for the body-soul dualism of Plato, it was Plato that dominated the intellectual discussion up to that point when Philosophy became established in universities during the period extending from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment philosophy of Kant. It should also be recalled that both Aristotle and Kant provided powerful arguments against the dualism and materialism of their times. Both philosophers were rationalists that rejected “dialectic” in its various forms. Neo-Kantians would for example recommend against falling into the temptation of the dialectic approaches firstly, of Hegel that led later to modern “Cartesian”phenomenology, and secondly, to the political philosophy of Marx. The Aristotelian and Kantian forms of rationalism both distinguish carefully between, firstly the metaphysics of ethics which concerned itself with action and its relation to “The Good”, and secondly, the metaphysics of nature which principally concerns itself with material change and the events bringing about such change. The being of the actor and his actions belonged namely in a different universe of discourse to the material being of changing substances which retain their ontological identity throughout change.
Ricoeur surprisingly claims in his essay entitled “Truth and falsehood”(P.167) that the best known truth-activity is to be found in the domain of empirical science: a realm in which mathematics plays a decisive role in the subjectivising of our perceptual experience. It was truth activity in this realm, Ricoeur argues, that brought about the dissolution of what he calls the “philosophico-theological synthesis”. The method of verification and its relation to the facts is what was regarded as significant for theory building in this realm of truth activity. The laboratory and its instruments, for example,(e.g. the Wilson cloud chamber) become in this activity, “cultural objects”, with a particular cultural “meaning”. Ricoeur invokes the idea of unity again in this discussion and claims that different sciences will specialise in different regions of being, and any attempt to find unity in a universal conception of “Science” is problematic. Nevertheless, it is science, and not reason and the understanding, which for Ricoeur, is the “touchstone of truth”(P.170). This “modern” conception of science, argues Ricoeur, calls into question the Greek conception of epistemé, and the discovery of atomic energy is mentioned in the context of this discussion. Science recategorises man in this “conquest” and man becomes just another “substance” in a category of “things”. This view returns us to those eras in our history when dualistic and materialistic presuppositions reemerge in the philosophical landscape: a view which will eventually lead to Hannah Arendt’s conception of humanity as being partly constituted by the “new men” for whom “everything is possible”. Scientific truth, for Ricoeur, has a “dialectical” character and is related to a “circle” of perceiving, knowing and acting(P.172). Somehow, in some obscure fashion, on this account, ethical choices begin to form in relation to the historical choices we have made over time as part of an endless questioning of the grounds of our ethical commitments and subsequent action. Part of this questioning occurs in aesthetic contexts when the artist uses “imagination” to both create something new, and to criticise life and perhaps the world as a whole. Ricoeur claims that if the artist is searching for unity, this unity is a lie and merely a wished-for entity that uses the authority of the artist “violently”. In true dialectical fashion, Ricoeur then also admits that the unity of Reason and Life, is a possibility as long as one does not attempt to tie them together too soon(P.176): this is a variation of a criticism Ricoeur makes of the ontological phenomenology of Heidegger, a philosopher he admires.
Ricoeur provides us with his own solution to the problem of unity by reference to those theological truths that are revelatory of a Person. This person is characterised in the truths of the scriptures and it is these truths that preachers attempt to communicate in their sermons. Of course we are reminded that the authority of theology is also “violent” in its essence. The above concentration on the particular(the particular life of a particular person) opposes the program of Philosophy whose view of unity is in terms of universal understanding. Ricoeur does insist, however, that the word of God is a “good” authority. What Ricoeur calls the “pathos” of authority does not however integrate easily with what he calls the “pathos” of freedom (which insofar as the theologian is concerned , it is claimed, is tinged with an anti-authoritative arrogance). Insofar as Kant’s critical philosophy aims at an “integral humanism”, it falls into the realm of the illusory. Yet we find here no mention of Kant’s Political Philosophy which Kant presents as a discipline with ethical foundations (which as a matter of fact he regards as a more encompassing discipline than theoretical theology insofar as our life is concerned). Ethics, for Kant, is founded upon capacities for judgement and choice that are based on a liberal conception of freedom, which amongst other things, is a freedom from the influence of a violent subjugating authority, and a freedom which in Enlightenment spirit “dares to use reason”. Ricoeur prefers to discuss Marxism, one of the sources of 20th century totalitarianism. He praises Marxism for being the philosophy of History par excellence, presumably because it embodied a rejection of the authority of a master class, the bourgeoisie, and also because it incorporated a defence of the subjugated class, the proletariat. Marx’s mapping of this historical relation between these two classes in terms of thesis, antithesis and synthesis ignored the political philosophy of Kant, which in fact inherited the Aristotelian vision of the importance of a “middle class” that embraces the most important values of the oligarchs and democrats who were dividing the city with their disputes and conflicts during the times of Plato and Aristotle. Marxism we know arbitrarily sided with the proletariat class on predominantly economic grounds that did not take into consideration the idea of justice as conceived of by Aristotle or the idea of freedom as conceived of by Kant. Ricoeur then claims startlingly, on P.185, that only Marxism can provide us with what he terms a “rational politics”.
Unity for Ricoeur clearly has a theological eschatological character that does not have the resources to adequately conceptualise the middle ground of Aristotelian politics: a middle ground which embodies the abiding values of oligarchy and democracy and rejects the injustices, inequalities and failures of these classes to respect the categorical law of respecting and treating everyone as ends-in-themselves. One would have expected any eschatological hope for an “integrated history” to, at the very least, incorporate these class-transcendent values. Instead we are invited to interpret this eschatological hope in terms of a Judgement Day or Last Day which presumably will bring History to a close with a day of truth in the person of Jesus Christ. This account describes De civitate dei as a very different city to De civitate terrana, perhaps because it is Babylon rather than Athens that serves as the model of the earthly city. St Augustine’s tale is indeed a tale of the two cities of Babylon and Jerusalem, but perhaps the more interesting tale would be that which examines the relations between Athens and Jerusalem: between the many meanings of Being and the monotheistic total authority of Gd who presumably gave us the freedom to build our cities rather than while away our time in a Garden of Eden.
In a short essay aiming at clarifying the issue of “unity” (P.192) Ricoeur claims that our relation to unity is also related to wish fulfilment and that the Truth cannot both be one and plural at the same time. The Aristotelian principle of noncontradiction claims that “the same time” must be qualified by “and in the same respect”, which leaves the door open for the idea of the Truth having different aspects. Ricoeur further claims that there cannot be any “intuition” of this unity because our relation to the world is a relation to that which is the most concrete horizon of our existence and toward which we can have a multitude of different “attitudes”(P.192-3) It is the power of perception which explains the necessity for remaining at the concrete level of the experienced life-world which is the source of all my acts, attitudes, cultural expectations and commitments. This life-world is then transformed into the Word(Logos) which cannot grasp the elusiveness of a unity that is the horizon for everything experienced. The unity of the life world, according to Ricouer, is “too prior to be possessed and too lived to be known”(P.194). In living all his attitudes, man is forced to “suffer” the plurality of all his objects”(P.194). The preferred form of unity for Ricoeur, is what he calls “eschatological unity”. This unity for the Christian is, of course, tied up with his lived faith. In this unity the charity of Christ, which is the hidden meaning of all human experience, will reveal itself on the Last Judgement Day and the Truth will be revealed.
Ricoeur refers to the biblical message “love thy neighbour” in his discussion of the modern world’s relation to this message from the Gospels. He claims that this message, emphasising the importance of the neighbour as it does, has disappeared and become abstracted into social institutions of various kinds(factories, military camps, prisons, concentration camps, etc( P.102). The idea of a neighbour as a consequence becomes marginalised, becoming a dream that we can awaken from once this world of ours falls into the state of ruin and destruction predicted by the Delphic Oracle. Ricoeur also uses the dramatic analogy of “committing suicide” in this discussion. It is interesting to note, however, that central constitutive cultural institutions such as schools, universities, and law-making governments, are regarded as repressive of positive social relations insofar as they trade in the traditional currency of Rationality rather than the crypto-currency of the power of the imagination. The image of society we are invited to form is that of a flawed creation heading for ruin and destruction.
Ricoeur calls “social man, “socius”, and connects him to the man of history, a man for whom the “love thy neighbour” message has been marginalised and who consequently does not cohabit well with his neighbour. This historical social being is a man of regret, dream, and myth, living in a state of chaos and needing the understanding of a friend. Suffering is a natural consequence of chaos and the neighbour is witness to this suffering. The neighbour stands outside the work context and is therefore untouched by Marxism and its conception of the “specialised” work process. The question to ask is whether “charity” is an abstraction in such a context, seemingly belonging to the private space of dwelling.
For Ricoeur, Evil resides in the objectification of social institutions and their divisiveness. It is further maintained that all forms of “progressivism” fail to understand such evil. Institutions of justice, in particular, Ricoeur argues, manifest:
” a foreign and cancerous passion, the passion of an abstract administration”(P.106)
This kind of description of institutions of justice is to say the very least, contentious, and implies that there is a “heart of corruption” present. Ricouer is here relying on the fact that periodic observations of such institutions may reveal such corruption, and that this then suffices for their universal condemnation. Institutions of Justice, however, are best defined by their telos or purpose which is to make just judgments and deliver just processes in a democratic environment of transparence and accountability. Individual instances of corruption ought not to to permit universal generalisation to the whole institution, its history and future.
Power relations, whether they be technocratic, ecclesiastic, political or military, are oligarchic rather than democratic. Such relations do not, Ricoeur argues, manifest those virtuous intentions which strive for the good of the individual and the community. Kant would, of course, argue that this is their purpose or telos, and what they ought to do, but Ricoeur does not, as we have seen, accept this form of ethical reasoning in the mode of the prescriptive. The categorical imperative of treating people as ends in themselves via the law: “So act that you can will that the maxim of your action become a universal law” is a problematic abstraction for Ricoeur. This form of reasoning is, of course, one of the foundation stones of democracy and requires considerable philosophical argumentation to defend: argumentation which must invoke the practical rational ideas of freedom, justice, and equality in the justification of duties and human rights. Periodic observations of the activities of our institutions can, of course, be the ground for making negative judgements about these activities, especially if these observations concern the corruption of the purpose or telos of these institutions, but the only way to measure the moral quality of these activities is via the above practical rational ideas which are situated logically and conceptually in the prescriptive ought-system of judgements.
The relation of man to his institutions, on the Kantian view, is “organic”, and this contrasts with the accusation of Ricoeur that our social forms of existence are “artificial”. This is not to deny that negative judgements can periodically be true especially when the focus is reversed from treating people as ends-in-themselves(phronesis) to treating them as a means to some bureaucratic institutional end(techné).
Ricoeurs solution to the problem of the alienated subjugated citizen in a chaotic society, is the initiation of charitable activity in relation to ones neighbour which as a matter of fact ought to be our natural instinctive response to the difficult task of living in a difficult sometimes dangerous world. Ricoeur’s reduction of the abstract “ethical” aspect of social activity to the more concrete descriptive level indicated in the message “love thy neighbour!”, fails to acknowledge the need for abstract judgments such as “promises ought to be kept” as families grow organically into villages, which in their turn organically grow into cities. Periodic observations record the disappointing facts that promises are made at institutional levels and then not, for different reasons actualised.If the reason for the failure to keep ones promise is related to dishonesty and promises were made solely for the purpose of acquiring power then this is clearly a case of treating people as means to an end, and the only rational response to such a state of affairs is not to abandon the imperative that promises ought to be kept, or indeed the goal of treating people as ends in themselves. The goal in such circumstances , rather, ought to be to judge this corruption in the light of the categorical imperative. Charitable acts towards ones neighbour and the keeping of promises are both categorical imperatives which actualise the intention of treating people as ends in themselves. Both imperatives may be regarded as “objectifications” but regarding objectifications as evil merely on account of their abstraction requires further argumentation which Ricoeur does not provide in this work.
Ricoeur notes the failure of the Greek city-states to survive as independent political entities, and the subsequent political need for larger entities such as nation-states. This organic development itself resulted in a need for international regulation of the kind envisaged by Kant(a United Nations regulating human rights). In such transformations, institutions are created which in turn need regulation by their communities if lapses from the central purpose(injustices) is not to lead such communities down the path toward ruin and destruction. In such circumstances it may be true to say, as Ricoeur does, that charity may be nothing more than an “alibi for justice”(P.108). This sets up a dialectical opposition between “socius”(the historical man) and the neighbour which, of course, is a part of the argumentation that is supposed to establish the truth of the claim that existence is fundamentally ambiguous. In this realm of ambiguity it is the power of the imagination, and not reason, or categorical understanding, that reigns. In such a realm, discourse fixates upon images, and one effect of this can be seen in the essay entitled “The image of God and the Epic of Man”(P.110). Ricoeur is, of course, aware of the limitations of conceptualising the image as an “imprint” and attempts to add an active dimension to this power by claiming that the image of God, for example, can be interpreted as the power of human creativity—thereby transferring the debate into the arena of the will and the power of thought. This creativity, Ricoeur argues, occurs in the midst of the chaos of evil which challenges our faith in the grace of God to “save” us. On the Christian account, Ricoeur points out, Jesus Christ is the rebirth of creation and the image of God is thereby given human form which enables a more concrete link to be made to the epical life of man.
“Our humanity is broken”, Ricoeur insists on page 113. This is the case because of the fundamental conflict between the private zones of the workings of individual consciousness when engaged in charitable acts towards ones neighbour, and the public zones of activity in economic, political and social life. Both zones are “mad”, Ricoeur claims, when related to the sane forms of moderation of our lives by meditation upon the image of God. In his further reflections upon this issue, Ricoeur turns to a consideration of the role of Language and invokes the biblical meaning of “logos”, which it is claimed is the name for God the creator. Creation is thus bound up somehow with language but it is not clear exactly how(P.113). Instead ,Ricoeur moves on to attempt to navigate a philosophical course between what he calls the dichotomy of the personal and the anonymous. Surprisingly, he turns to Kants work on Anthropology for an account of the “spheres of influence” that affect the reality and history of man.These spheres of possession, power and value, are situated respectively in the economic, political and cultural arenas of the activities of man. Ricoeur does not make this point, but we should recall in the context of this discussion, that Kant makes a clear distinction between that which assists in the processes of the civilising of man(possession, power) and that which constitutes his cultural being(e.g. that which makes him a worthy man and citizen of his society). Naturally there is a complex relation between these arenas of activity but, on the Kantian view, it is the activity in the Cultural arena that ought to regulate activity in the economic and political arenas. Ethical reasoning becomes the primary regulator of all significant human activity. This is similar to the Aristotelian account of ethical virtue in which areté and arché play important roles in all spheres of influence, e.g. doing the right thing in the right way at the the singular right time in accordance with appropriate prescriptive principles. Ricoeur argues that these “spheres of influence” help to avoid the dialectical confrontation that would otherwise occur between the private and public zones of activity referred to above. Ricoeur, given his opposition to Kantian abstract ethics, wishes instead to chart the “epic of the image of God” and ask how this focus can illuminate the significance of our three spheres of influence. Evil threatens the downfall of these three spheres especially via the uses of language for lying, gossiping, flattering, and tempting. These abuses together with the misunderstandings arising because of the scattering of various languages suffices for Ricoeur to maintain his sceptical stance toward the one singular message of Kant’s Anthropology, namely, that all is well in these spheres so long as ethical principles and laws regulate activity in them.
Ricoeur praises Marx for not being a moralist(P.115) and also praises Marx’s concept of “alienation”. Capital, Ricoeur claims, in agreement with Marx, “entails a certain destruction of humanity”(P.115), dehumanising man and turning him into a possession, a slave. In a world dominated by Capital, it is argued, speech and thought become fetishes.
Power, Ricoeur argues, is hierarchical in its essence and promotes inequality between men, and it is this phenomenon that History most concerns itself with. In the Bible, Ricoeur points out, we encounter the complaints of the prophets made against the mighty and powerful kings. Many of these kings were tyrants who had in various ways enslaved their people and turned them into cowards. This passion for power, Historians have noted, so often ends in madness and death. Ricoeur wishes to use theological anthropology to pick up the scattered pieces of man whether it be those that have been alienated or violently subjugated. Hegel is invoked via the idea of the struggle for recognition of the slave against his master, and situated in a culture that provides images of man via works, monuments and objects. For Hegel this process was fundamentally historical but for Ricoeur it is theological anthropology, and the striving after the grace of God that will help save man from himself and the evil that surrounds him. Such a vision assumes an authority that is created by God and it is admitted that:
“In spite of their violent nature, empires have been influential in advancing law, knowledge, culture, the well-being of man, and the arts. Mankind has not only survived, it has grown, it has survived and become more mature, more adult.”(P.121)
This of course, is roughly the vision of Kant but there is in Kant’s Anthropology less of an appeal to the image of God, and more of an appeal to mans nature as expressed in the formula “rational animal capable of discourse”. Kantian man believes in God as a guarantor of the summum bonum of a good-spirited flourishing life. Kantian man is also to a greater extent a political being, paying more attention to the practically rational idea of freedom than the theoretically rational idea of God. For Kant, Evil is wrought by the unsocial sociability of man, which so often results in antagonism toward his fellows and it is the failure to regulate this antagonism that generates evil. Regulatory mechanisms include discourse and the rational ideas of freedom justice and equality that permeates the declared intentions of our institutions. On P.125, Ricoeur partially acknowledges the gravitas of the Kantian account by acknowledging the importance of the construction of the City that will function in his account as a sign of the Kingdom of the imago dei. This acknowledgment apart, there is very little similarity in these two accounts given the central place of the power of the imagination in Ricoeurs anthropology. For Ricoeur, it is redemption and salvation that is the theological telos of the Kingdoms of the future. The role of sound judgement and sound reasoning in this vision is not clear. Neither is it clear how freedom and responsibility could possibly be justified in terms of a power of the imagination.
Ricoeur is clearly influenced by the linguistic structuralist position in his characterisation of subjectivity in terms of consciousness expressing the powers of perception and imagination in the arena of singularity and event -causation. He characterises such expression in terms of “meaning”. This issue is discussed in his essay “Objectivity and Subjectivity”, and Ricoeur admits that History involves knowledge of the traces of the past but simultaneously and curiously wishes to use the term “observation” in relation to the activity of the processing of historical documents. He also uses, in this context, the naturalistic term “working hypothesis”(P.23).Applied to the human and social sciences this involves the ordering of singular phenomena and the search for the “same” function in other similar events(P.24). “Types” of phenomena emerge in such a process, e.g. economic, political, cultural. The historical aspect of such a process involves the establishing of historical facts that Ricoeur characterises as the “integral past”(P.24). Kant is mentioned in relation to this “regulative idea” of the “integral past”, but Kantian rationalism is on the whole rejected on the grounds of unnecessary abstraction and sometimes the kind of concretisation of the discourse appears to be in favour of the kind of discourse one encounters in modern physics. In many respects this kind of commitment to “the science of human society” provides the strategy for historical understanding of historical facts. We know that trial and error and “working hypotheses” are common to both structural analyses of texts and the inductive work of physicists engaged in their work of exploration/discovery. Ricoeur refers in this discussion to the understanding of “wholes” organically, via the use of the imagination but not, however, connected to understanding and reason as we encounter them in the sciences of space, matter, and life.
History is conceived of, then, as an integral history of the actions of magnitude of past men as well as the values of “humanity” we share with all men as defined by the parameters of “sympathy”(P.30) Ricoeur separates understanding from judgement, by associating the former with “feeling and imagination” which, for him, constitutes what he calls a “good subjectivity”: a sign of a shift from “the logical” and towards the “ethical”(P.32). He associates what he calls the “history of self-consciousness” with this so called “ethical” perspective, and Husserl is invoked as a pivotal influence. We are invited then to replace the question “What is X?” with the question “What is the meaning of X?” Justification of the meaning of a phenomenon thus replaces justification via the objective cause of, or reason for, or conditions of, a phenomenon. The kind of meaning Ricoeur is in search of is that which can be attached to individual persons and singular works(P.36). History thus becomes the development of meaning irradiating from what he calls “irradiating centres”(P.39). Reference is also made here to the sudden appearance of centres of consciousness as events and structural forces are invoked, e.g. economic, social, political, and cultural. The reflective activity of the historian is thus subtly transformed into a subjective factor and connected with the curious claim:
“The object of history is the human subject itself”(P.40)
Clearly Ricoeur is not referring to the human subject in general, or human powers such as rationality and discourse in general, but prefers rather to refer to individual centres of consciousness engaged in involvement with singular works expressing economic, social, political or cultural “meanings”. Truth on this account is the personal task of individuals situated in contexts of exploration/discovery of the many meanings of Being( hoping ontologically to arrive at a terminus of true knowledge). Considerable ambiguity is implied in such a “subjective” account but, Ricoeur argues, this is merely the expression of “the ambiguous state of mankind”(P.56).
In an essay entitled “Note on the History of Philosophy and the Sociology of Knowledge”, Ricoeur maintains that there is a significant difference between a “Genuine History of Philosophy” and a “Scientific Sociology of Knowledge”. Such a science, he argues, has the purpose of investigating the economic, social and cultural conditions of thought in the spirit of theoretical hypothesis-formation. The History of social existence plays an important role in such a venture, and Marx is mentioned in the context of describing the working form of social existence that has essential connections to the economic realities constituting such an existence. In such theoretical excursions, both functional and meaningful relationships are described. The end result of such investigations is the ontological hope that empirical laws will emerge which govern the relation between dependent and independent variables. “Common types” such as the concept of “class” are appealed to, and this in turn appears to require an account of the relation between the singular social existence of an individual and the conceptualisation of an essence which goes beyond the category of “Quantity”. Ricoeur, in the context of this discussion, appeals to the idea of “logos” and the power of discourse, which, he claims, transcends the “realities” of “work”. Such an account:
“form the story of the thinker with respect to his own social motivation”(P.61)
The Hegelian concept of “irony” is referred to but the reflection appears to be unfinished, leaving the relation between logos and functional, meaningful relations we encounter in relation to social existence and the History of Philosophy, hanging in the air. It is unclear, that is, whether the spirit of Hegel is haunting these reflections or whether some more critical spirit is involved. In a later chapter entitled “The History of Philosophy and Historicity” Hegelian Philosophy is referred to as entailing a “systematic approach to the systematic method of the Historian”. Ricoeur explores the theme of understanding via Hegel’s account of Spinoza (who separated the philosophy of substance from “subjectivity”) and the paradoxical conclusion is drawn that it is this “separation” which explains the ethical aspect of Philosophy. Whilst this may be a correct interpretation of Spinoza’s Philosophy, it certainly overlooks the history of the term “substance” in Aristotle’s thought. Aristotle moved away from characterising “substance ” as a materialistic regulative idea toward a more abstract hylomorphic idea of substance as “form” or “principle”: this hylomorphic idea entailed no alienation of the “ethical” from the objectivity-constituting principles governing our understanding of social reality. The characterisation of this important realm of our existence in terms of “irony” is problematic in that it collapses and conflates a large number of distinctions recognised by both Aristotelian and Kantian accounts of the understanding and Social Existence.
Ricoeur accuses the Historian of not penetrating to the core of singular or individual existence because of an obsession with what he calls “typology”, e.g. class. The problem of providing an account of historical understanding is thus made more difficult because of the presence of the polarisation of the field of discourse by a false pair of alternatives, namely, Hegelian “systematic” philosophy, and Spinoza’s account of singular individual essence. As a consequence of the operation of these two dialectical opposites, Reason becomes a vicissitude of self-conscious reflection, and for all intents and purposes is “psychologically reduced” to the logos or meaning of consciousness. Focussing upon meaning enables Ricoeur to finally reject Hegelian Absolutism and side with the idea of self-consciousness as presented in the Philosophy of Spinoza. This, it turns out, requires a form of “projection” of oneself into another( in the process of forming contact with another) which assimilates the idea of a singular existence into the idea of a solipsistic form of conscious existence similar to that found in Spinoza’s reflections. In the context of such an account we would do well to recall that “projection” for Freud was a vicissitude of consciousness involving the imagination of a paranoidal form of consciousness that defensively protects itself by the falsification of reality.
Ricoeur obviously takes seriously the concept of “class” in History and Philosophy, claiming that the Cartesian form of rationalism emerged as a consequence of some kind of need of the French bourgeoisie. This form of sociological explanation relies upon a deterministic view of social and political reality that would be, by implication, rejected by Kantian ideas of freedom and creativity: ideas that invoke a form of self-consciousness requiring an agency that can uniquely cause itself to do things independently. In this context, Ricoeur acknowledges that reflective philosophical questioning on the many meanings of Being expresses a philosophical intention that is opposed to the kind of deterministic social causation referred to above. Ricoeur also claims that reference to “typologies” merely raise otiose questions. This may well be true insofar as the concept of “class” is concerned, but this point cannot be generalised to all ideas of “types” some of which are well embedded in the conceptual networks of our understanding and judgement. In defence of the concept of “class”, however, it ought to be pointed out that this concept has important implications for the description of a small range of social phenomena. Focussing on singular forms of existence also determines the kind of linear causality that may be appealed to in any explanation of changes in the forms of such existence. This form of material/efficient causality is , according to Aristotle’s hylomorphic account, a very limited form of explanation.
Ricoeur introduces the idea of “false-consciousness” in his account of the way in which written works are embedded in their “situation”. in some mysterious fashion the “work” in transcending its “situation” thereby “dissimulates”. It is not clear why Ricoeur wishes to maintain such a position but there is also reference to “irony” and also reference to Sartre’s aesthetic account of the relation of the artist to his work. The idea of “structural types” is also invoked in connection with Ricoeur’s claim that there are two aspects of historical understanding. He calls these “aspects” “models of the truth” and Pascal is called upon to testify to the “hypothesis” that the singular whole of one humanity is presupposed ante-predicatively by the historian and his understanding of his field of study. On the other hand, Ricoeur argues, man is plural and history must also be about the plurality of men and events. It is this dualism that is implied in different philosophical works and which motivates Ricouer’s ambiguous position which in turn results in the claim that Hegelian Phenomenology suppresses history in favour of the “forms of Spirit” that are nullified by Logic.(P.75)
“Lived History” is, then, on Ricoeur’s account, characterised in terms of “virtual structure” and “virtual event”. It is the interaction of this “thesis” and “antithesis” that then constitutes the synthesis of “The ambiguity of History”, a paradoxical conclusion given the fact that neither Truth in general, nor Historical knowledge in general can be “spiritually ambiguous”. On Ricoeurs account, both the “false consciousness” of Marx and the displaced consciousness of Hegel generate paradoxes which working Historians do not “live” or “experience”. In a chapter entitled “Christianity and the Meaning of History”, Ricoeur claims that a “false problem” confronts the philosopher, namely that concerning the opposition between secular materialistic views of “progress” and the Christian eschatological “mystery” of the world and life(with its implied “hope” for the “salvation of man”).
Ricoeur further argues that, in the realm of the works and tasks of man, and in the realm of knowledge, there are distinct possibilities of accumulation and progression. The history of techné and the history of moral reflection both accumulate and “progress” in their very different respective ways. The History of Socrates, for example, is the history of his decisions and acts as well as the events involving him. The historical account of the life of Socrates, however, is also a dramatic narrative that attributes an abstract value to the events of his life, his acts, and his decisions. Reversals of fortune in both directions are important in life narratives, e.g. the tragic reversal from good to bad fortune as a result of an act of magnitude that unleashes a chain of harmful events which end in impacting ones own life. Christian life-narratives highlight “reversals” of a more positive kind, e.g. the narrative of the reborn Christian who has been “saved” and who feels “safe” even in the face of harmful events threatening to impact ones life catastrophically.. Both of these alternatives differ significantly from the kind of incremental instrumental changes we encounter in the world of techné. Where does knowledge belong in this reflection: in the dramatic sphere of change or the less dramatic slower instrumental incremental sphere of techné? Technical knowledge obviously belongs in the latter sphere. Theoretical and Knowledge is a “form” the Greeks designated by the term epistemé, and this involves the understanding of principles that, once understood in the appropriate way, enable one to see the world in a new light– a dramatic change of historical significance for man. This kind of epistemological “event” obviously also involves a transformation of the personality of man– a rebirth involving seeing the world in a different way. This phenomenon, when it occurs in the moral context of action, transforms man into a different almost “holy” being and this can be, as it was in Kant’s reflections, connected with the Christian eschatological hope for the man who is “saved”. Such a man, it is assumed, can transcend his narcissistic desires and “sublimate” them by developing a desire to be worthy of the good-spirited, flourishing life.
Ricoeur conflates theoretical and practical knowledge(epistemé, diké) with technical knowledge and the form of incremental change associated with techné, and therefore misses an important dimension of mans personality. He speaks in this context of value and admits that it is difficult to show in detail how incremental technical progress could alone fulfil the destiny of man(P.85). He points to Adam’s flawed decision to break the vital bond with divine power, and this does not fit comfortably with the Enlightenment interpretation that Adam might be exercising his freedom to use “knowledge” to determine his future destiny. In the beginning of the Biblical narrative, the “reversal” for Adam gives rise to a connected “reversal” for Cain and Abel, when the former kills the latter, his brother. Ricoeur notes the lack of interest for epistemé in the Bible which chooses instead to focus on a future Dei civitate dei, in which man will dwell in this “perfect city”, loving his neighbours and his enemies– a city in which human relations and humanity(needs of the soul) is far more important than the instruments and equipment we need to meet the needs of the external world and the body which partly constitute our “civilisation”. Civilisations rise and fall, Ricoeur points out, but he is convinced man will endure cyclically, remaining one throughout a series of crises. It is this factor, Ricoeur argues, which enables History to study multiple civilisations. Yet it needs to be pointed out that History is not concerning itself specifically with narrating the dramatic reversals of events over time. History’s concern, rather, is to create a seemly “historical distance” in relation to these events and view them objectively through the lens of knowledge and “principles”. This kind of historical abstraction is overlooked by Ricoeur who refuses to see that the concrete can have an abstract aspect. He prefers instead to relate to those narratives that come as close as possible to “living” the events being reported.
There is, in Historical texts, a preference for the political term “citizen” in contrast to the more social term “class”, probably because the former is more categorical and universal: the term “citizen”, that is, relates to laws that cover all classes whether they are oligarchic or democratic. This more formal term also suffices to discuss the Aristotelian ideal of the “middle class” who follow laws respectfully in the interests of the unity of the city. “Class” is, of course, a more concrete phenomenon, as was claimed by Marx and his followers.
History is an epistemological project of man and therefore an important part of his education–especially from the perspective of the Delphic Oracle who predicted that everything created by man was destined for ruin and destruction. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle responded to this divine prophecy with the creation of the discipline of Philosophy: a discipline that strives to understand life from a timeless perspective, through the lens of a wisdom that uses knowledge in order to avoid the ruin and destruction of humanity. Epistemé is complemented with areté, diké, arche, and phronesis in the historical research process which formulates aporetic questions and provides answers which go well beyond “working hypotheses”. Ricoeur regards the above reflection as otiose because, in his view, it does not acknowledge sufficiently the importance of the singular existence of men and their works.
Ricoeur analyses the Christian faith in terms of the hope for salvation in a context of “mystery”, rather than knowledge. It is “mystery” Ricouer argues, that allows the Christian to transcend the essential ambiguity of life, men and their works. The Christian “lives” the ambiguity of secular history by interpreting and diagnosing it in terms of his faith in the sacred history or the significance of the “mystery” that has revealed itself to him/her. In a sense, therefore, the Christian lives in both of St Augustines cities(Dei civitate dei and Dei civitate terrana)
Ambiguity, Ricoeur argues,(P.94) is the last word for the Existentialist, but probably only the second last word for the Christian. The final word for the Christian is salvation, and it is this that separates the cities of Jerusalem and Athens(for whom wisdom or philosophical knowledge is the last word). Kant united these two cities in his resurrection of the ancient Greek commitments to episteme, arché, diké, areté, and phronesis and also united a possible commitment to the unity of faith and knowledge in the context of freedom and rationality that politically demanded a full understanding of the Delphic prophesy that man “know himself”. This theme was restored with Kantian Critical Philosophy, but for him there was nothing mysterious about the hope for a better world in the future, and that hope could well include the moral messages of Christianity.
The “hope” of Marxists influenced by the dialectical method of Hegel focussed upon techné and the expectations and demands of the proletariat for a richer materialistic future. This would be viewed by Christians and Kantians alike as the logical consequence of the denial of the importance of the spiritual and rational dimensions of mans life. Such a denial was only made possible by the assertion that the phenomena of man, his works, and his life are systematically ambiguous, and attempts to explain and justify these phenomena illusory.
The Translator’s(Kelbley, C., A.,) Introduction to this work notes the role of Gabriel Marcel’s thought in relation to Ricouer’s reflections:
“Gabriel Marcel stated that we live in a world which seems founded on the refusal to reflect. On several occasions he insisted that the fate of Philosophy and civilisation are intimately related, implying that the philosopher does not have the privilege of abstaining from participation in the crises of his epoch. Surely, there is no need to underscore the role of existentialism and of phenomenology in the “persistent unyielding struggle against the spirit of abstraction”(Les Hommes contre l’humain(Paris, La Colombe, 1951)
Both of these movements, phenomenology and existentialism, are motivated by a desire to return to things themselves or existence itself. Such a desire appears to arise from the belief that abstract thought has no signifiant philosophical content and allows anything and everything to be thought in abstraction from what is actually happening in the world. The constraints of the the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason do not appear to suffice for the phenomenologists and existentialists to create the “special meaning” they seek in their reflections upon our “being-in-the-world”: whether it be the world we represent or the world we aim to change via our voluntary acts of will. Kant, in the name of the Enlightenment, felt the need to tear down the medieval metaphysical towers of reflection clouding the philosophical landscape and further urged that we, in our philosophical reasoning return to the Aristotelian notion of the metaphysics of “first principles”.
Hegel, in the course of “turning Kantian Philosophy on its head” rejected the above principles approach in favour of a dialectical method that regarded any principle as just another “thesis” waiting to be countered by an anthesis and thereby become part of a synthesis which as part of an ever growing circle would become a new and equally provisional thesis waiting for rejection and the beginning of another dialectical process. The effect of this Hegelian discussion was to refocus philosophical reflection on “Meanings” and “Interpretations of meanings” as well as the idea of “Spirit”. This latter idea referred to a succession of spiritual ideas which have the effect of expanding the “field of self-consciousness”. Spirit is divided by Hegel into the realms of Objective Spirit, which covers the domains of economic, social, moral, political and historical aspects of being, and Absolute Spirit, which covered the domains of art, philosophy, and religion. This account separates the arenas of the moral from the philosophical and this requires special explanation as does separating the political concern for justice from the “absolute” concern of Philosophy.
We argued in an earlier work : “A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness, and action”( Lambert Academic Press, Mauritius, 2019-2022) that History is intimately related to the principles of truth and knowledge in a way that will not be overturned by a dialectical spirit of teleological meanings forging into the future. This relation to principles acknowledges the past above the future and also involves a moral metaphysical import that will be related to the journey of the ages toward a Kantian cosmopolitan “kingdom of ends” in which both freedom and rationality will play important founding roles. These ideas will, for Kant, be important founding ideas of the political/religious telos of our “Being-in-the-world”: a telos Kant equates with a “hidden plan” of progress. Both Art and Religion, in Hegel’s view merely symbolise the “Absolute”, whereas Philosophy is the final spiritual outcome of what Ricoeur calls the “work of civilisation”. It is of course difficult to fathom how philosophical reflection could be unrelated to the political and moral dimensions of our existence, in the sense of presenting us with the “first principles” of justice and freedom, and also in the sense of how these “principles ” could be unrelated to the “principles” of History, truth, and knowledge. The Aristotelian/Kantian methodology of approaching phenomena from the perspective of what explains/justifies them is rejected by both Hegel and Ricoeur in the name of “unmotivated rationalism”.
The Aristotelian/Kantian conception of the law/principle is an organic conception that applies not just to the phenomena associated with psuche, but also to phenomena such as the transformation of villages into cities. For Hegel this kind of teleological transformation is an “abstract” process that will only reveal its true nature at the end of this process of “actualisation”. In such circumstances when the “end” cannot be used to explain “why” one did what one did, the focus shifts to the means to the end, which literally, on Hegel’s account of the march of spirit, could lead anywhere and everywhere. For Hegel, the only “principles” that can be abstracted from such a theoretical account of agency and action are those that Arendt focussed upon as the means or concern of the “new men” of the modern age, namely “everything was possible”(for a few) and “nothing was possible”(for the masses). It was these “maxims” that enabled those in power to mobilise the masses in favour of the “Obsessions” of those in power with “violent” solutions to problems requiring more abstract and rational/contemplative solutions. The “alienation” of the masses allowed the philosophy of the “will to power” to emerge as the motivating factor for “popular” governments. Knowledge and rationality as characterised by ancient Greek and Kantian thinkers were marginalised in favour “phenomenological description”. In particular, the Kantian metaphysics of morals and its associated political character was reduced to dualistic or materialistic accounts of phenomena requiring action-related explanation or justification rather than event-related explanation or justification. Hegel speaks in terms of world-historical individuals and world-historical events embodying world-spirit, rather than in terms of the action related ends-in-themselves we find in the Kantian idea of the kingdom of ends.
The major theoretical tools of Aristotle and Kant are of course the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason and these contrast starkly with the major theoretical tool of Hegelian dialectical logic which is Negation. For Aristotle, for example, it is not clear how the “organic” transformations from family-life to village-life to polis-life can be meaningfully conceptualised as movements of “negation”. Certainly a city is not a village and a village is not a family but this truth is limited in its meaning because a village is a collection of families and a city is a collection of villages and the relation of the family to the village and the village to the city is both an “organic” and a “practical” relation: a collection of families is a necessary condition of forming a village and a collection of villages is a necessary condition for the forming of a city. The fully formed entities of the village and the city are constituted of both necessary and sufficient conditions that are presented as part of the principle of sufficient reason. On page 156 of the work “A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness and Action”, Vol 2, the following claim is made:
“There is no doubt, for example, that, for Aristotle, Normative life is naturally and rationally tied to the successive actualisation of powers and capacities of the “rational animal capable of discourse” and also along this continuum of actualisation there will be biological, social, and political manifestations of animality, discourse and rationality.”
The powers involved are potentialities of “psuche”(defined in terms of the “rational animal capable of discourse”) and have little in common with either the theoretical power of negating a thesis in order to expand ones field of self-consciousness or the “recognition” of ones self as a consequence of the synthesis involved in a dialectical process of negation.
This of course is a position that has little in common with the individual understanding we have of individual objects that is so important for the account that Ricoeur favours. Abstraction in the form of universal reasoning, Ricoeur argues, removes us from this sphere of the understanding of individual existence. The life of an individual is always singular and cannot be captured in the general formulae of rationality and this is why the primary category of investigation is “meaning” and why the context of exploration/discovery always takes precedence over the context of explanation/justification.
Ricoeur poses the question, “How can the events of History be meaningful if one is to maintain an understanding of their singularity and unrepeatability because of the unique position they occupy in the continuum of events that follow one another in a linear sequence in which successive events provide the “meaning” for the events that have occurred previously.” For Ricoeur, there can be no “objective history” without subjectivity, no universality without singularity. Singular existence can occur without being conceptualised but this power presupposes that several or many individual things possess something in common that can be represented on more than one occasion. This power of understanding conceptually, however, is one of the primary powers of thinking that prepares the sensible powers of perception and imagination for the act of representation in concepts that in turn categorise intuitions with a view to synthesising these elements into truth-conditional representations/judgments. Ricoeur criticises this Kantian picture of understanding by claiming that the task of truth is connected to nothing more than an ontological hope which cannot possibly “know”that the end one arrives at is truly explanatory or justificatory. What is further needed, Ricoeur argues, to explain the singularity involved in existential experience, is ” an active participation in the mystery of my body”. This position connects to that presented by Merleau-Ponty, in his work “The Phenomenology of Perception” where it is clear that the body is locked into a perspective or point of view that cannot be transcended in signifying acts. Man, on this view, is a “flawed creature”. Meaning is achieved by a so-called, “creative interpretation” of this “broken unity” of man. In true Hegelian fashion Ricoeur regards the meaning of History as ambiguous, resting on a “feeling” of a hope which cannot be founded upon what he describes as the “violent” synthesis of the truth..
The above reflections do not amount to a critique of civilisation, a theme that appears to have disappeared from a Phenomenological radar system that has been designed to detect “singularities”. The reduction of self-consciousness to a singularity possessing singular powers waiting for the “end” of action to “dawn” belies the Aristotelian-Kantian “abstract” accounts in which a transcendent self-in-general is endowed with abstract rights and responsibilities. We will not turn to narratives for an account of such a transcendental self but rather to the kind of tribunal that we find in contexts of explanation/justification. In such contexts we encounter complex accounts of phenomena relating to individual powers embedded in three media of change(space, time, matter) four causes of change, and four kinds of change, all of which relate to three principles of change which in their turn rely on the logical principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. The kind of narrative that informs us of the dialectic of the master and the slave, ending in a moment of “recognition” in a context of conflict, is certainly a phenomenological exercise articulating a life-space concretely. The response of the later Wittgenstein to such a “phenomenological reduction” was to insist that the philosophical challenge was to provide an account that concerns itself with what he called “the possibilities of phenomena” rather than an account that concerns itself with their actuality or existence as brute facts. We can of course in concrete narratives “interpret” the intentions of actions but in so doing we should be careful to note that we are not finding linear causal connections between two concrete events, but rather we are giving a conceptual account of the relation between an intention and an action.
Ricoeurs conception of the self of self-consciousness shares some of the Hegelian animus but it does begin at an existential level and reduces the complex repertoire of mans powers to the effort to exist and the desire to be as manifested in the works of man. Ricoeur regards society as flawed and this fact manifests itself in the exploitation of work by society. In the preface to the first edition of “History and Truth”, Ricouer characterises his position as follows:
“I believe in the efficacy of reflection because I believe that mans greatness lies in the dialectic of work and the spoken word. Saying and doing, signifying and making are intermingled to such an extent that it is impossible to set up a lasting and deep opposition between “theoria” and “praxis”. The word is my kingdom and I am not ashamed of it. To be more precise, I am ashamed of it to the extent that my speaking shares in the guilt of an unjust society which exploits work..I believe in the efficacy of instructive speech: in teaching the history of Philosophy….As a listener to the Christian message, I believe that words may change the heart.”(P.5)
Ricoeur, too, like Hegel, raises the question of the objectivity of History and warns us of the danger of “global interpretation” of History. He also resembles Spinoza in his focus on the understanding of individual singular objects. There is an unmistakeable antipathy toward Reason and what Ricoeur calls its “presumed and pretended unity”(P.10) The conflation between theoria and praxis we encounter in the above quote fails to recognise the ontological distinction (recognised by both Aristotle and Kant) between The Good(in the arena of action) and The True(in the arena of events and their linear causation). The Phenomenological Reduction thereby brackets the world (that we categorically understand and reason about) and limits discourse to being about “things themselves” rather than the doing involved in the action of “making things true” and “making things better.”
One of the key questions posed in the final chapter of Ricoeur’s work is connected to the problem of the difficulty of the conceiving of the concept of forgiveness. In the previous chapter, we pointed to the fact that Arendt and the Aristotelian hylomorphic and Kantian Critical perspectives would have no problem accepting the psychoanalytically-oriented proposal of relating the concept of forgiveness to the concept of trauma, and the tendency of the compulsion to repeat connected with trauma. An international catastrophe such as the holocaust obviously left large numbers of dead in its wake, but it also left witnesses traumatised, and every public recollection of the event, is not always related to the “work of remembering” engaged in by Historians. Trauma, psychoanalytically conceived, is a compulsion to “act out” in response to the anxiety generated in the memory system by the traumatic event.
One public response to an international trauma is the reluctance to recall the event, but this act of forgetting is not always met with understanding by those that have been affected by the trauma, either directly or indirectly(being witnesses). In such circumstances, the desire not to recollect, may well be met with the war-cry–“Never Forget!”. War-cries, however, more often than not, are cries of pain for both relatives of victims and witnesses who view the act of forgetting with suspicion, believing that forgetting will result in a repetition of the causes of the trauma of the past. The concept of “forgiveness” is a complex concept, implying paradoxically, a “duty not to recollect”, and the motivation for this duty is exactly to avoid compulsively repeating the trauma in question. In such circumstances it is important to recognise the difference between the perpetration of a great crime, and the experiencing or witnessing of a great crime. The duty not to recollect cannot of course be directed at the Historian, who always has a duty to engage in the “work of remembering”, which includes the recording of the great crimes of History. The best concrete example of the response of a Historian to an international trauma involving a war-crime against humanity was the historical coverage of the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt. The implication of this coverage was that we could never “forgive” Eichmann the individual, but nevertheless in her work of remembering and recording of the event of this trial, it remained essential that the record be correct. Her judgment of Eichmann was that he was someone who “could not think” about what he was dong, could not think reflectively about the rights and wrongs of his actions. This abstract “philosophical” characterisation of Eichmann, caused a storm of controversy amongst those who thought that Eichmann was a “monster”. These objectors probably did not consider the weight of this criticism by someone who believed that thinking was essential to being human. Arendt also argued for the death sentence for Eichmann thereby also alienating those who believed that Eichmann could be “forgiven” for his part in a war in which it was dangerous not to obey orders. The conclusion that can be drawn from Arendt’s involvement in this affair is partly that the singular action of a singular individual is not part of the extension of the concept of “forgiveness”, which actually is a maxim/principle or public/national action. The individual stands accused in the court, and all those witnesses who failed to intervene perhaps became traumatised by their failure to act: but the guilt that is felt in this latter case is more moral than legal and it is no less real for being so.
The psychoanalytical problem of being continually confronted by an aggressor from whom there is no escape, is the problem of being then forced to identify with the aggressor and the consequent refusal to recognise the evil of ones own actions. The slave of such an experience inevitably wishes to be the master of other slaves. “Forgiveness” in such circumstances may then merely consist in a refusal to allow this process of identification to take place, which in turn, might include the refusal to hate the aggressor and become traumatised in the process.
Some crimes, Ricoeur correctly suggests are so terrible that it is difficult to even conceive of an appropriate punishment and they may constitute :
” a de facto instance of the unforgivable”(P.473)
The legal presumption of innocent until proven guilty for individuals guilty of such terrible crimes stretches the understanding to breaking point. The Bible of course challenges us to love our enemies, a piece of advice Freud thought was dangerous. Our enemies seem neither to demand this love nor understand it, but the point is that one should live without expecting any return on our investment. Such a capacity, Ricoeur argues, is an extraordinary gift.
The Great trials for the war criminals of the 20th century were, of course important for the victims and their relatives and provided for them, if not closure, at least a cathartic moment of resolution. Hannah Arendt in a later work entitled “The Human Condition”(Chicago, Chicago University Press,1958, 237) relates the concept of forgiveness to the concept of promising even if the latter seems to suggest power and political treaties rather than religious belief and rituals. For Kant, promising has an important ethical function that is conditional upon the Truth in that it brought with it the expectation that the state of affairs promised would be actualised.
Ricouer claims in the context of this discussion that Arendt foresaw that “there is no politics of forgiveness”(P.488) but this judgment is questionable, especially in the light of her response to the Eichmann trial. Arendt’s reflections on the Eichmann case surely implied that the historical work of remembering be transformed into a rational judgment that was reliant on a rational understanding of ethics and the law. But this implication would not have been welcomed by Arendt, who was not by any stretch of the imagination a rationalist, explicitly rejecting Kantian rationalism in a work on Kant’s Political Philosophy.
In a discussion of Agency, Ricoeur draws a distinction between the “Who?” of agency and the “What?” of the action”. This distinction of course marginalises the “Why?” of the action, which is normally revealed in the reason for the action which, in terms of Kantian critical practical philosophy, is the major ontological identifier for the action. The agent is of course in some sense the “cause” of the action but that discussion limits us, insofar as the Kantian account is concerned, to the categories of the understanding of the action, and is consequently more related to the “What?” of action(a question that is posed theoretically rather than practically). Kant’s critical Philosophy, as we know, demands that we turn to practical reasoning for an account of promising and its universal and necessary characteristics. Ricoeur criticises Arendt for situating forgiveness in the framework of acting and its consequences, rather than the theoretical relation between the agent and the action. On such a theoretical account, guilt becomes internalised in the inner world of the agent, and the theoretical possibility of forgiveness then requires the separation of the agent from the act. The concept of power that emerges from such a theoretical discussion then brings with it the further consequence that, if the agent can be disconnected from his action theoretically, then there is also the possibility of not holding him/her responsible for what was done. Yet we clearly saw Arendt, the Historian, holding Eichmann responsible for his actions, and refusing to accept Eichmanns defence, where he attempted to disconnect himself from his responsibility. For Arendt, in this work, the agent, Eichmann was connected to his action by the potentiality for thinking which he failed to exercise.
It almost feels that we are back in the Garden of Eden with our frustrated creator who rejects the exercise of our power of freedom to choose the power of knowledge to organise our futures. If we are flawed, our freedom is part of that flaw, and our creator must bear some responsibility for such a state of affairs, if we are to continue to use the language of the myth. The Kantian interpretation of this myth involves celebrating this act of freedom, and this choice of knowledge, whilst rejecting the accusation of being flawed. For Kant there is no shadow of radical evil darkening the light of our existence. Ricoeur, in fact, surprisingly cites Kant in this discussion only to reject his “vocabulary” because it is too “theoretical”(P.493). Knowledge of the Good, for Kant, implied the unconditional absolute of a “good will”, and evil was thus conditional upon this unconditional. This “vocabulary” however, was “paradoxical” for Ricoeur, simply because the potentiality for rationality involved , for him, an unacceptable metaphysical commitment. Kant would not have accepted any theoretical attempt to detach this good will from the agent, simply because of the practical claim that the good will was an unconditional assumption, and the connection between this will and the action was conceptual/logical. Kant’s rationalism, moreover, embraced the ancient Greek idea of arché or principle as central to the context of explanation/justification that we find in our knowledge of the Good.
Ricoeur discusses the “Garden of Eden” myth using the vocabulary associated with “The Fall”-from innocence, which Kant by implication rejects in his remarks on “Religion within the bounds of mere Reason”, as well as in his remarks on Religion in his three Critiques. Ricoeur attempts to close the gap between the Fall and Judgement Day with the idea of the “grace” of God that is bestowed upon the faithful. This network of ideas makes it difficult to uphold the ideas of Humanism and Freedom espoused in Kantian Philosophy. Kant’s idea of faith lies beyond knowledge and is related to the categorical imperative which regulates the activity of the will in circumstances of responsibility and duty. The ought-system of concepts(regulating both instrumental and categorical forms of action) in the imperative mood(expressing in the latter form of action, a moral necessity), is not reducible to the preferred grammatical category of the optative mood(expressing a subjective wish) touted in Ricouer’s criticism of Kant(P.491).
Faith is, of course, related for to the question “What can we hope for?” Kantian hope, however, is not the same as wishing but rather related to the territory of responsibility and duty expressed by the categorical imperative as part of the answer to the question “What ought we to do?” We hope to be happy but we do what will make us worthy of happiness. Whether we will, in fact , become happy(lead a good spirited flourishing life) is a contingent matter, which can only be hoped for. Hope and faith are related, and faith in this case is not faith in the Freudian God, the father, but rather faith in the divine architect of the universe whose work we can only glimpse through a glass darkly via the theoretical and practical principles which we know. This idea of happiness is, for Kant, the “summum bonom” of knowledge, duty, and faith. For Ricoeur, who, throughout this work has been engaged in the tasks of phenomenology and hermeneutics, memories are “faithfully” related to the past and the language we use to express them(in the optative mood):
“Faithfulness to the past, is not a given, but a wish. Like all wishes it can be disappointed, even betrayed.”(P.494)
What is it that we wish for, then, on Ricoeur’s account? A happy memory is his answer. This of course raises the awkward question about the relation of a happy memory to the truth of History. Presumably a memory produced by the “work of remembering” in relation to the holocaust, is a happy memory, but there is an air of paradox hanging over this conceptualisation of the work of remembering related to the holocaust. This position, however, is qualified by the claim that it is:
“up to the recipients of the historical text to determine for themselves, and on the plane of public discussion, the balance between history and memory.”(P.499)
So, the responsibility for telling the truth about the dead of the past is, to some extent, placed on the reader, and not on the writer of the text, who, after al,l was the agent who had access to the archives. Wishes are figments of the imagination, so it is not surprising that Ricoeur turns to a description of a painting by Klee(Angelus Novus) to illustrate a view of history he finds interesting:
“A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he fixedly is contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of History.. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling up wreckage upon wreckage and hurling it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise: it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”(Benjamin, W., “theses in the Philosophy of History”. Illuminations, Trans. Zohn H., New yORK, schooner Books, 1969, 253-64)
Perusal of the actual painting, however, reveals that the above is a Rorscharchian interpretation, and requires much projection to arrive at the above description. Elisabeth Anscombe in her comments on Wittgensteins Tractatus, and its Picture Theory of meaning, remarked how a stick-man picture of a fencer does not have an unambiguous meaning. The diagram can both depict how one ought not to stand(in a defensive position) and how one ought to stand(in an attacking position). Pictures on such accounts are like Kantian intuitions and can be compounded into many different conceptual representations. The above is, of course, the reflective result of a certain form of anti-rationalism that wishes to emphasise an important role for the imagination in History.
Ricoeur then moves on to an attempted characterisation of the concept of a “happy forgetting”, the paradigm for which is “an amnesty”, which he claims is typical in those historical circumstances such as the founding of a society or community where violence is involved, e.g. the founding violence that occurred at the establishment of Athens. In such circumstances, Ricoeur argues, one cannot “be continually angry with oneself”(P.501) and the only reasonable solution appears to be an amnesty which legitimates forgetting and “sublimates” the anger. This is what Ricoeur calls a “happy forgetting”. He leaves any further evaluation of this “solution” open and claims that both the happy memory and the happy forgetting are best categorised grammatically in the optative mood, which of course is an anti-rationalist consequence of an anti-rationalist perspective.
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