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Ricoeur’s hermeneutical approach to Philosophy acknowledges a debt to Heidegger which, in turn, engages in a form of metaphysical and transcendental speculation about the power of the imagination that would have been rejected by both Aristotle and Kant. Kant is criticised by Heidegger for failing to recognise the scope of the power of the imagination, and this is linked to a “forgetfulness-of-Being”- thesis proposed by Heidegger, as one of the foundation stones of his phenomenological-existential approach to articulating the relation of Dasein(Being-there) to Being-in-the-world. Ricoeur believed that Heidegger’s philosophical results were essentially sound, but the route he took to arrive at them,were short-cuts, and therefore not ultimately satisfactory from his phenomenological/hermeneutic point of view. Ricoeur preferred the Cartesian inspired phenomenological route, outlined by Husserl, that proceeded via the description of objects of experience which relied on the use of a method that put the world in brackets(whatever that means). Language was also a focus of concern for Ricoeur, and he chose to focus on the idea of “meaning”, rather than “truth” which, he claimed, better articulated our relation to a life-world that , for him, seemed to require “interpretation” rather than articulation in terms of the principles of reasoning and the categories of the understanding(so important for knowledge). For Husserl, the “knowledge” that the sciences claimed to possess or discover, was “putative”, and largely a consequence of what he referred to as a “crisis” that manifested itself in the Western sciences in general.
Ricoeur discusses briefly the history of the term “plot” in the opening chapter of this work, and notes that, during the time of Aristotle, the focus of attention was upon tragedy, comedy, and the epic forms of narrative. He cites the relatively modern emergence of the novel, and characterises this phenomenon in terms of “convention-busting” (a laboratory for experimentation). In this experiment, he maintains, we may have witnessed the disappearance of the concept of “plot” from the “horizon of literature”(P.7) In volume one, it was claimed that it was the disappearance of the plot paradigm that was the primary reason for the choice of the term “quasi-plot”, which was also accompanied by the curious term “quasi-character” in Historical forms of narrative. In all these forms of narrative, there is a clear and distinct retreat from the paradigms of argument, to the “forms” of “analogy” and “interpretation”. The term “quasi-plot” was, of course, an attempt to generalise the concept of plot, so that the term could still be applied to, amongst other things, the modern novel. In this situation, the imagination was clearly conceived by Ricoeur to be the organising power in relation to the consciousness of the characters of the plot. For Aristotle, on the contrary, the plot was the “form” which organised the “matter” of the action and thoughts of the character, and Language was merely the “medium” for the messages of the work. Language, for Aristotle, as was the case for Kant, could be used irrationally to produce both false and meaningless statements as well as rationally ( to produce true and universally necessary statements). Insofar as language was being used intentionally by the author to create a narrative with a meaning that may largely be generated in the imperative mode, because it is being focussed on the Good rather than the True, there is no necessity to argue that because the statements are not strictly true, they do not possess a mode of objectivity. It would not be correct to say, that the statements the author produces, are false, because they are not aiming at what is the case, but rather at what ought to be the case.
There are, in fact, alternative explanations (to the one provided by Ricoeur) for the emergence of the modern novel that has, according to Ricoeur, loosened its ties to the notion of “plot”, and strengthened its ties to a modern notion of “character”. “Modern” representation of character, is often in accordance with modern personality theory, which in turn is the result of the “separation” of Psychology from Philosophy in the 1870’s( in the name of “Science”). The multi-faceted representation of a “person”, that we found in the writings of Aristotle and Kant, were largely jettisoned in the divorce between Psychology and Philosophy, with the exception of the work of Freud. Practical understanding and reasoning, connected to the ethical dimension of character, were ruled out as “subjective”, in accordance with materialistic and dualistic theories that had earlier been neutralised by Aristotelian and Kantian arguments. “Raw behaviour” and sensation-like forms of consciousness became the “atoms” of a theoretical approach, that phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty criticised in his work “Phenomenology of Perception”. Yet even in this work we saw an attachment to Cartesianism, and a criticism of science which construed it as some form of second-order account of reality, in comparison with the first order description of our activity in the life-world. Both the categories of the understanding, and the principles of reasoning, were marginalised in favour of more sensible aspects of the powers of our mind. This, together with a materialistic commitment on the part of science, resulted in methodologically committed observers, devoted to the manipulation and measurement of independent and dependent variables. Both Logical positivism and logical atomism, and their commitment to methodology, combined to promote observation and criticise introspection( as a method of producing data for manipulation and measurement). Many modern personality theories confined themselves to sensible and behavioural powers, and avoided what they regarded as “speculation” upon those higher cognitive powers and processes, so necessary for being a person in our complex cognitively constructed worlds(e.g. understanding and reason). It is obvious that, from a hylomorphic and critical point of view, both understanding and reasoning have been parsed away in the processes of scientific and phenomenological reductions. An endless journey on the path of exploration/discovery is preferred, to sitting in the auditorium in which phenomena are submitted to the tribunal of explanation/justification.
With reference to the reflection above, we can maintain that there are at least two other explanations for the phenomenon of modern art in general, and the modern novel in particular. Firstly, one of the reasons the journey on the path of exploration is necessary, is because the task of the sojourner appears to be that of discovering something new and unique. What is often not taken into account, is that the medium, for example, of narrating the lives of characters embedded in their life-worlds, is a finite medium: i.e. at some point there will be nothing new to discover because the medium is exhausted. This may have happened in the eight-tone based classical music, whose disappearance gave rise to the twelve tone atonal modern music, and other modern art exhibitions such as Cage’s 4 minute 33 second silence. Whether modern novelists felt this way about their creations becomes, in the light of the above, an open question. This is one possible explanation for the phenomenon Ricoeur refers to. Another possible explanation is connected to Heidegger’s thesis of the “forgetfulness of Being”. Now, we do not accept that preferring to focus on the sensible power of the imagination, (at the expense of the higher cognitive powers of understanding and reason), is “remembering” something that has been forgotten, because this, in our view ,is merely an extension of the modern rejection of the work of Aristotle by the “new men”(Descartes, Hobbes, Hume), which continued with the rejection of Kantian critical theory by Hegel, and a scientific movement, that eventually culminated in logical positivist and logical atomist theory where the world was “reduced” to a totality of facts. Our argument is that ,if we refuse to discard our powers of understanding and reason, narrative retains the possibility of being imperative-driven, and motivated by the Aristotelian “aim at The Good”, and its ought system of concepts. On this kind of account, the idea of “plot” too, is salvaged, and the claim is that it is driven by principles that are teleological and essence-specifying. This kind of account also manifests a refusal to situate this discussion in a context of exploration and discovery, and an insistence to remain in the auditorium in which the tribunal of explanation/justification is taking place. Hannah Arendt’s references to the role of the “new men”, for whom “everything was possible”,(including the colonisation of the planets for profit) and the rest of us for whom, as a consequence, “nothing was possible” anymore , gives this whole discussion a political dimension and suggests that the “phenomenon of the modern had totalitarian aspects. Since the occurrence of two world wars and the dropping of two atomic bombs on civilian populations in what Arendt called the “terrible 20th century, in every age and every generation there is no absence of evidence that we are still in the grip of the “philosophy” of these “new men”.
Ricoeur summarises his position in relation to the modern novel in the following manner:
“It is within the realm of the modern novel that the pertinence of the concept of emplotment seems to have been contested the most. The modern novel, indeed, has, since its creation, presented itself as the protean genre par excellence. Called upon to respond to a new and rapidly changing social situation, it soon escaped the paralysing control of critics and censors. Indeed, it has constituted for at least three centuries now a prodigious workshop for experiments in the domains of composition and the expression of time.”(P.8)
Ricoeur cites Virginia Woolf and what he describes as a stream-of-consciousness methodology, claiming that the primary issues for here were:
“the incompleteness of personality, the diversity of the levels of consciousness, the subconscious, the unconscious, the stirring of unformulated desires, the inchoative and evanescent character of feelings”( P.10)
The above description of Woolf’s work, however, appears to be sufficiently multifaceted to manifest the more classical concerns about narrative, which stretch well beyond the imagination, and our impulsive emotional life. Desire, for example, for Aristotle, included the desire men have to know. The unconscious, as described and explained by Freud, also was embedded in a system of principles(the energy regulation principle, the pleasure-pain principle, and the reality principle), that required both understanding and reason to comprehend. Freud’s principle-based personality theory, inspired by Kant, was a very different kind of theory to the “new” variable-based trait theories, searching for correlations instead of causality.
Ricoeur also discusses the modern attempts to create a “new” genre, in which exact correspondences between reality and the world of the literary work, was the aim—the kind of resemblance that memory had, to what it remembered, appeared to be the focus of attention in some attempts. Now, whilst the power of memory is related to many other powers(e.g. semantic memory), it is its relation to sensory circumstances that appear in these attempts to be most important for Ricoeur. The question also arises in relation to this venture: how complex is the reality that one is attempting to duplicate or imitate. If, for example it includes actions of magnitude which aim to restore order in a chaotic world, in accordance with ethical principles, e.g., the defeat of Richard III, then there does not seem to be much substance in Ricoeur’s criticism.
There is an awareness in the writings of Ricoeur, of the modern malaise, our modern discontentment that so often focuses upon our civilisations. It surfaces in the following:
“Today it is said that only a novel without plot or characters or any discernible temporal organisation is more genuinely faithful to experience, which is itself fragmented and inconsistent, than was the traditional novel of the 19th century”(P.13)
He poses the curious question of whether the modern style of narrating includes within itself the possibility of “dying out”(P.20), and he appears to think that an affirmative answer to this question is conceivable, pointing to the example of the deliberate choice of an author not to provide an ending to their work. If action, as a matter of fact, possessed merely an episodic character, this would suggest an attempt to imitate an action without any vision of its end, and perhaps also without any vision of the more distant goods it may bring about. Action, in reality, in contrast to the fragmented experience referred to by Ricoeur above, is embedded in an ought-structure, in which the imperative mood prevails. Heidegger draws attention to inauthentic forms of action connected to the failure by “They” to acknowledge the “good” associated with death(e.g. as manifested by Socrates in the face of his own imminent death.). Inauthentic forms of action are, of course, pathological and defensive, even if the imagination, fuelled by fear, is one of the sources for the denial of the meaning of death.
Ricouer makes an interesting detour in his account, and ventures into the realm of religious writings in the Bible, which contains both a mythic-historical account of Genesis, and a vision of an Apocalypse that necessitates the wish for salvation and a life after death. Ricoeur realises that this biblical representation is comprehensible, only under the condition that the narrative form has not died out:
“For we have no idea of what a culture would be where no one any longer knew what it meant to narrate things.”(P.28)
Historical narratives also require an understanding in terms of categories and principles and they too must aim at “The Good” in a context of explanation/justification.