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We use calendars and clocks for organising the future, but also for remembering, understanding, and reasoning about the past. Both “instruments” use numerical measurements to measure time in terms of before and after. Clocks help us to measure intervals of time, and help us to determine the beginning, duration, and end of the work day, building upon instincts and vicissitudes of instincts. A major emphasis of this form of organisation is on, beginning at the same time of the day, ending at the same time of the day, and working the same number of hours every day. This is, in accordance with Aristotelian principles of change, which specify that something must remain the same throughout the change. The calendar also measures beginnings, durations, and ends, but here the emphasis is upon differentiating days and larger units of time from each other, e.g. the first world war from the second world war. The clock and the calendar, then, form the time framework that helps to organise what Wittgenstein referred to as the “hurly-burly” of community activities, but it is the calendar that is of central importance for the concern of the community with History and the remembering of important events. Ricoeur acknowledges the differences between the “telos” of the clock and the calendar:
“Despite all the differences that can be found between the clock and the calendar, however, reading the calendar is also an interpretation of signs comparable to reading a sundial or a clock”(P.183)
This reference to “reading” and “interpretation” for an activity of the understanding, may be problematic especially considering that there is no difficulty for anyone to answer the questions “What is the time?” or “What is the date?” We do, of course have to look at the clock or the calendar, but the recognition of the time or the date, is an immediate effect, very similar to immediately understanding the meaning of a word. We immediately understand what we see, and do not have to see what we see “as” something using the power of imagination. For Ricoeur, however, the date of an event involves identifying an actual present with a particular unit of time, e.g., a day. Memories, on this view become dated events on a time continuum. The notion of a “trace” is again invoked and this trace is “interpreted” using the power of the imagination. The power of memory is thus marginalised, and this is unfortunate given its central importance in our understanding of the world. Wittgenstein points to a major difference between memory and imagination by claiming that the former can be correct or faulty, whereas in the case of the imagination there is no question of its correctness or faultiness, or indeed, any question of a cognitive relation to the external world. Wittgenstein, in the context of this discussion, speaks about the difference between remembering the time of departure of a train and the conjuring up of an image of a train time-table:
“If the mental image of the time-table could not itself be tested for correctness, how could it confirm the correctness of the first memory?”(P.265)
For Wittgenstein, the lack of relation of the image to the external world, indicates a fundamental incompleteness, if one wishes to regard the image as having “cognitive” content, and this may be why a process of “interpretation” is suggested. Memory can be faulty, but this does not testify to a fundamental incompleteness or a need to “interpret” its signs. The Historian uses the language game of reporting in his various activities, which, of course, presupposes the correct operation of “remembering”, an operation he trusts:
“509. I really want to say that a language-game is only possible if one trusts something.”(On Certainty, Wittgenstein, Oxford, Blackwell, 1969)
A dog, for Wittgenstein, does not have the mental capacity to expect his master to come home for Christmas. Indeed, a close examination of the dogs behaviour, reveals an attachment to signals in the immediate environment and the present moment . These signals form the basis for a recognition of things to come, which can initiate a limited form of expectant behaviour. This limited form of expectation, tied to a primitive memory function of “recognition”, confines the canine form of life to the present. It should also be observed, that forms of life which do not possess a language, are also limited in their mental and cognitive powers. This position can be complemented with a Heideggerian account of Dasein, which maintains that the primary temporal relation of our form of Being-in-the-world is an orientation toward the future. Thinking about the future, for a being possessed of a powerful memory, and a complex language, obviously also makes the measurement of time by clocks and calendars possible. It also enables political and ethical discussions in the agora, and the creation, reading and understanding of historical and fictional texts.
There are, Wittgenstein argues, general facts of nature which partly determine our being-in-the-world, e.g. cosmic facts such as the relations of hot, cold, wet and dry that are necessary for the creation and sustaining of life on a planet. These general facts of nature also include psychological potentialities which arise from the battery of integrated sensible and mental powers that characterise human forms of life. This kind of account obviously has affinities with both Aristotelian Hylomorphism and Kantian Critical Philosophy. Memory is a key power in the context of this discussion: not memory in its most primitive form of recognition, but rather memory as characterised by the kind of complex accounts we find in Freud and Wittgenstein. For Freud, to take an example, memory is a complex vicissitude of instinct that provides human forms of life with a relation to the external world and the past that can be expressed correctly in language in the form of reports. The language-game of reporting, Wittgenstein claims is fundamentally tied to the Truth:
“The truth of my statements is the test of my understanding of these statements”(On Certainty, 80)
Wittgenstein also implies that memory is similarly related to the truth, and he further claims that, whilst individual/particular memories play a role in relating me to my past, general knowledge of a number of empirical propositions such as, “The earth has existed for a long time”, also play an important role in our historical understanding of our world. If asked how such general knowledge is possible Wittgenstein claims that it is :
“The inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false”(OC 94)
Wittgenstein also speaks of the language-game of judging, and claims that judgements and beliefs form a system, which mutually support one another. Children are then inducted into this form of life, piecemeal, over a long period of time. This induction process requires trust in the adult which then is transferred to the system of judgments and knowledge the adult is using. The adult acts on the truth of his knowledge and judgment, and this is a further confirmation of the validity of the system for the child. Action is an important justification:
“Giving grounds, however, justifying the evidence, comes to an end, but the end is not certain propositions striking us immediately as true, i.e. it is not a kind of seeing on our part:it is our acting which lies at the bottom of the language-game(OC 264)
The Historian, too, believes in a number of empirical propositions and makes historical judgments which are correct, on the basis of the presence of witnesses and documentation. The occurrence of events are corroborated in the acts of testimony or documentation that are part of the procedure which results in the creation of historical texts. Even the production of these texts is an instance of the historian acting on the basis of his system of knowledge and judgements. If the text created is then used in schools:
“The schoolboy believes his teacher and his schoolbooks.”(OC 263)
These remarks on Memory and Judgement do not fit comfortably with the account that we are given of these elements by Ricoeur, who speaks of incomplete texts, suspicious readers, and the need for hermeneutic phenomenological “interpretations” that explain and justify in terms of the hypotheticals of “the imagination” and “seeng-as”. The integrity of Tradition and custom is definitely preserved in Aristotelian Hylomorphic and Kantian critical accounts of History and Fiction, Memory and Judgement, but they simply cannot survive intact in the climate of incompleteness and suspicion outlined above. In Aristotle, Kant, and Wittgenstein there are propositions that appear to be “empirical” but in fact function “normatively”, as principles or rules embedded in a language-system, which in turn is embedded both in the hurly-burly of community activity over millennia, and forms of life determined by very general facts of nature. The whole depends upon an integrated system of sensible, linguistic, and intellectual powers. Wittgenstein´s specific contribution to this discussion, is connected to his methodology of grammatical investigations in which logic and rationality cannot be “described”, but rather “shows itself” in the practice of language. Language-games, according to Wittgenstein, are not rational in themselves but “there–like our life”(OC 559). If someone, for example, denied that the earth has existed for a very long time, then, and only ,then would we, Wittgenstein claimed, resort to “persuasion” and rhetoric to convince them of the truth.
It is difficult to know exactly what Ricoeur means when he refers to the role of historical imagination in the explanation /justification of historical judgements. Ricoeur’s argument seems to run in the opposite direction to the account given by Wittgenstein. He claims, for example that:
“The past is what I would have seen, what I would have witnessed if I had been there” (Ricoeur “Time and Narrative”, (P.185)
The argument is cast in terms of the priority of the present, and the activity of observation(seeing). We also, it is implied, use imagination in fictional contexts when we, for example, see events as tragic, comic etc. This emphasis upon the priority of the presence of something that can be observed or seen, is also used to characterise fiction in terms of the illusion or hallucination of presence(P.186) Fictional narration, Ricoeur argues, reports something “as if” it were in the past. The Aristotelian criterion of fiction being an imitation of reality, and history being a true report about the past, is lost in this discussion. Imitation, of course, does permit an exercise of the power of imagination on the part of the author and reader. This power is then, in the normal case, integrated with the understanding, and judgements are produced that “exemplify” universal and necessary aspects of our response to the “form of finality” of the objects (expressed by aesthetic ideas) we are appreciating. In fictional narratives the aesthetic issues and principles used, are more directly related to practical rather than theoretical reason. These ideas in a different form are also the concern of the Historian—e.g. freedom and justice–but the concern is not expressed in reports about important events(e.g. a war), but rather in judgements about those reports(the terrible consequences of a war).
The suggestion by Ricoeur that History and Fiction can be interwoven is, then, a fruitful suggestion, but only if we focus on those aesthetic ideas and principles that relate to ideas of practical reason, and only if we focus upon the powers of memory ,understanding and reason, and refuse to prioritise the sensible powers of perception and imagination. There is also common ground in what both Ricoeur and Wittgenstein call a “vision of the world”, which involves a vision of a future world: a vision that perhaps builds upon a mutual belief that man is not as rational as he ought to be, and perhaps also more violent than he ought to be. This reference to a better future may also involve moments of catharsis for both the Historian and the fictional author.