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Ricoeur concludes this chapter with the claim that Kant is blind to any account of Time which attempts to understand the phenomenon of time via a phenomenology of internal-time consciousness. This state of affairs, Ricoeur attributes to a commitment on the part of Kant, to the Newtonian objective view of Time, which in its turn, is committed to an epistemological ontology of nature. For those familiar with the writings of Kant, especially his work “Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View”, we find Kant defining the scope of the domain of Philosophy in terms of 4 fundamental questions, the fourth one of which is “What is a human Being?”, and throughout this work we find this question answered by reference to a number of Aristotelian hylomorphic assumptions. It is important to note here that, in the Anthropology, Kant presents the soul as inserted in a cosmopolitan context which immediately calls into question the above claim by Ricoeur, namely, that Kant is committed to an epistemological ontology of nature.
Aristotle begins his essay “On the Soul” with an account of psuche which relies on the fundamental elements of “movement” and “sensation”. Aristotle also claims that principles “form” these elements and reference is made to Anaxagoras:
“Anaxagoras, as we have said above, seems to distinguish between soul and thought, but in practice he treats them as a single substance, except that it is thought that he specially posits as the principle of all things…..He assigns both characteristics, knowing and origination of movement, to the same principle when he says that it was thought that set the whole in movement.”(405, 14-18)
Aristotle summarises his initial historical summary of views on the soul, in the following way:
“All, then, it may be said, characterise the soul by three marks, Movement, Sensation, Incorporeality, and each of these is traced back to first principles.”(405b10-14)
The term “Principle”, for Aristotle is equivalent to the complete account of what it is that the principle is attempting to explain or justify. In terms of the concepts of actuality and potentiality, Aristotle maintains that the soul is the actuality of a human body, and its potential for life, discourse, and rationality. The organised system of organs constituting the human form of life is, of course, a decisive material cause or condition of this form of life. The body is the material base from which the concrete activities of life and knowledge actualise themselves(Book II 1. 20-28). The account of the soul Aristotle finally settles upon. is complex, but can be summarised in terms of his essence-specifying definition, namely, rational animal capable of discourse. Actuality is part of this account but it is not the stark reality of a referent standing present-at-hand. Rather, the following kind of account is given:
“Suppose that the eye were an animal–sight would have been its soul, for sight is the substance of the eye which corresponds to the account, the eye being merely the matter of the seeing.”(II,I,18-20)
Matter, on this hylomorphic account, is actual being, and form is potential-being. The psychic powers of man are spread out over forms of life stretching from nutritive activity to the most complex forms of thinking activity, e.g., the powers of discourse and rationality. The essence of the power involved is thus captured by an essence-specifying definition of the principle involved, e.g. rationality is connected to the principles constituting the categories, and the principles used in reasoning,(noncontradiction, sufficient reason). Thinking is a power connected to both the powers of discourse, and the powers of rationality. Aristotle likens thinking unto perception, because both powers, in their different ways, discriminate and are aware of “what exists”.(427a, III,19-22). Thinking does, however, differentiate itself from perceiving in its relation to the normative. Thinking is:
“..that in which we find rightness and wrongness—rightness in understanding, knowledge, true opinion, wrongness in their opposites: for perception of the special objects of sense is always free from error, and found in all animals, while it is possible to think falsely as well as truly, and thought is found only where there is discourse of reason.”(III, 427b, 9-14)
Aristotle continues in a Kantian vein and claims:
“Thinking is different from perceiving, and it held to be in part imagination, in part judgement, We must, therefore, first mark off the sphere of imagination and then speak of judgement.”( III, 427b,28-29)
Imagination, for Aristotle, is a sensory power which, in itself, cannot “know” anything, but has important contact with material objects and events in the external world. Thought, on the contrary, is in a sense immaterial, and without any nature, being a pure potentiality, and it is this part of the soul that is, on Aristotles account, the “place of forms”. Forms, or principles, then, are intimately related to judgements. On Kant’s account these principles or forms were embodied in his “categories” of judgement. Aristotle, however , spoke of “categories of existence” rather than “categories of judgement”. These two positions are not necessarily contradictory, but there is nevertheless no attempt by Kant to deal directly with the issue of their relation.Aristotle concludes by claiming that existing things:
“are either sensible or thinkable, and knowledge is, in a way, what is knowable and sensation is in a way what is sensible.”(431b III, 21-23)
The relation of sense to knowledge claims(judgements) insofar as the soul is concerned is stated in the following:
“It follows that the soul is analogous to the hand: for as the hand is a tool of tools, so thought is the form of forms, and sense the form of sensible things.”(432A, III, 1-2)
The complexity of judgements is reflected in the claim that thought appears to be about what one encounters with ones senses. The grammatical form of the judgement reflects this fact—the subject is the matter, and the predicate is the form the matter takes( the predicate, that is, is the further conceptualisation of that matter of the subject which is already conceptualised in the presentation of the subject). The consequent “form” of the judgement is, that it judges something about something, aiming at the truth. Judgements, in Aristotle’s logic, then, combine to form arguments, which also produce the knowledge of what is true, on the condition of the truth of the premises and the correctness of the reasoning process. In these arguments, thoughts(and not images) are synthesised. This is confirmed by Aristotle:
“Imagination is different from assertion or denial: for what is true or false involves a synthesis of thoughts. In what will the primary thoughts differ from images? Must we not say that neither these not even other thoughts are images, though they necessarily involve them?”(432a III, 10-12)
Kant gave us an account of how the imagination schematises our concepts at a level prior to that of judgement, in which either sensory identification or a concept is related to another concept. In the context of action, however, both Aristotle and Kant would agree that deliberation can be associated with imagination, and both can be involved in a decision-making process of whether to do X or Y. Insofar as judgement is involved in such a process, it is the particular judgement at the end of a chain of reasoning, that moves the agent to act. Imagination is not obviously present in the universal premise that inevitably begins such a chain of reasoning. Such a chain relates concepts to what ought to be done universally and necessarily.
There is no direct reference to Time in the above Aristotelian reflections upon the nature of the soul and the human being, but Aristotle’s essay “On the Soul”, does close with a discussion of death, and how it involves a permanent loss of the sense of touch which Aristotle claims founds our relation to the external world:
“without touch it is impossible for an animal to be”( 435b III, 17-18)
It is when a human being is conditioned by a lapse of time, that memory supervenes as a modification of his sensory relation to his environment. Some animals possess memories but, Aristotle argues, no animals possess the powers of recollection, language or reason. Memory is, of course, necessary for the perception of time, and the relational perception of before and after. Recollection, on the other hand is, Aristotle claims, a “mode of inference” which is a simpler kind of investigation, and also a part of a context of exploration/discovery in which imagination is involved. This is an important part of the process of how we acquire sensory knowledge.
Now it is clear, that Kant relies on the above principles in relation to his reflections upon Time. Newton, as Ricoeur wishes to maintain, does not contribute anything essential to Kant’s account of the a priori form of inner intuition, which is involved in recollection, perception, and expectation. Newtons essentially mathematical accounts of Space and Motion, carry with them temporal implications, but Newton does not think of Time in terms of our faculty of an inner phenomenon:
“Absolute time and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature flows equally without relation to anything external, and by another name is called duration: relative, apparent, and common time is some sensible and external (whether accurate or inequable) measure of duration by means of motion which is commonly used instead of true time such as an hour, a day, a month, a year.”(Scholium to Newtons Philosophiae Naturalis Principa Mathematica)
Aristotle would reject the claim that the mathematical idea of Time is the true absolute, which “flows equably”. For Aristotle, on the contrary, the mathematical idea of a number series presupposes the “before-after” structure of time. He would, however, acknowledge that the number series is necessary to measure duration, if one wishes to compare durations with one another. These durations must nevertheless be measured “in terms of before and after”.
For Kant too, the Newtonian mathematical view of time, suggests a relativity(to absolute time) we do not encounter in the Aristotelian or Kantian accounts. In contrast to this trio of thinkers(Aristotle. Newton, Kant), Husserl wishes to bracket what he called “objective time”, and interiorise the intuition of time: thereafter enabling him to attempt to “describe” the phenomenon in terms of a phenomenology of internal time-consciousness:
“But what is actually excluded from the field of appearing under the name of objective time? Precisely world time, which Kant showed is a presupposition of any determination of an object.”(Ricoeur, P24)
On the Husserlian account, the “flow of consciousness” is synchronised with the so called “objective flow of time”(P.24), which is then characterised in terms of “one after the other”. Husserl is clearly not engaged in either an Aristotelian or Kantian investigation, in which one begins at the level of Principles, and moves to the level of phenomena. Rather, the reverse is the case, and instead of principles, Husserl goes in search of descriptive a priori truths, that mysteriously emerge from the phenomenological reduction of a world that is placed in brackets.
What emerges from this investigation is not an objective continuum organised in terms of before and after, but rather a field of consciousness, from which one derives the activities of protention, retention, and recollection. A very simple perceptual encounter with an enduring sound, is used to illustrate these concepts. For example, there is a retention of the phase of the sound that has just passed, and a protention of the coming phase. A very physical/materially oriented discussion ensues in which there is talk of:
“the fusion of the present with its horizon of the past in the continuity of the phase.”(P.29)
and this is subsequently translated into the mental language of consciousness. It is maintained that an “impressional consciousness” is transformed into a retentional form of consciousness. Remembrance is then invoked, in order to relate retention to memory and “remembering”. This in turn introduces the role of the imagination into the account, and we are then invited to consider the differences between present retention and representation in general. Representation associated with expectation, however, is not discussed, and it may well be that the focus of Husserls account on the primacy or perception is the reason for the omission:
“Husserl conceives of expectation as little more than an anticipation of perception.”(P.37)
Ricoeur points to this anomaly in Husserl’s account, and refers to the concept of Care in Heideggers work “Being and Time”. Care is fundamentally a future oriented phenomenon: intentionality is projected into the future. The Husserlian reduction, on the other hand, appears to be committed to the present and the past: a past in which memory preserves the intentionality of what was once present in a “flux of consciousness”, ” a flux that constitutes itself”(P.42). Representation, on this kind of account, becomes merely an impression in this flux.
The Kantian account is principle-oriented, and exactly for this reason is, contrary to Ricoeurs claims, a refutation of the type of account Husserlian presents us with. Insofar as “representation” can be both what happens to one when one is passively affected, as well as something which we do(an activity), it takes both intuitive and conceptual forms. Insofar as we are dealing with representation in its intuitive form, we are dealing with objects that are affecting us, and insofar as we are dealing with representation in its conceptual form, it is primarily an activity of the faculty of the understanding(that is, of course, as we have claimed, connected to the schemata of the imagination and the faculty of sensibility). Schemata, related to Time via the category(of the understanding)of substance is characterised by Kant as follows:
“The schema of substance is permanence of the real in time, that is, the representation of the real as a substrate of empirical determination of time in general and so as abiding while all else changes.”(a143, B183)
This is an important aspect of our understanding of what is real ,and consequently also an aspect of our judgements relating to the real. The permanence of the real is evident in the example Kant chooses, of the boat sailing down the river. This is a real event actualising in the present and relying on the following Aristotelian principles:
- That from which a thing changes
- That toward which a thing changes
- That which stays the same and endures throughout the change.
This is more than the mere “following of a rule”. Rather, what we have here, is a principle guided succession taking place in accordance with the organisation of sensible experience in terms of “before” and “after”.
Ricoeur acknowledges in the context of this discussion the distinction between contexts of exploration/discovery, and contexts of explanation/justification. In the former we are concerned with the actualisation of the schematisation of the concept, and in the latter, we are concerned with a category that is related to the schema via principles. For Ricoeur, however, this transcendental determination of Time does not reach down into the depths of the consciousness of our existence. We need, Ricoeur argues, to take a more indirect path, if we are to correctly describe the phenomena involved in such consciousness, namely that of the phenomenology of internal time consciousness. But even this indirect appeal will not suffice for a complete account because, Ricoeur argues, both the Kantian and the phenomenological accounts “borrow from each other” and “mutually exclude each other”(P.57)
Ricoeur then startlingly claims that Kantian Transcendental Critical Philosophy lies closer in spirit to Augustinian Philosophy than it does to Aristotelian Hylomorphic Philosophy. The chapter ends with the accusation that Kant is attempting to tie Time to an ontology of nature that is more ideal than real, but here again the argument presented is obscuring the fact that it is Aristotle’s view of nature and time that is being presupposed in the Kantian account(and not the Newtonian mathematical view of nature and time).