Time and Narrative, Volume 1 by Paul Ricoeur
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
While a brilliant work, I found the layout of his work troubling. Ricoeur is definitely able to tease out minute difference between ideas, explicate authors who may not speak directly to one another, and relate them to the larger thesis as a whole. But I found his structure to be troubling as the work is split into two sections, which seem only related via the concepts of time and narrative… (even if this is a multiple volume work, he should outline a better road map.)
Really, these two concepts do not coexist at the same level. When he first starts, Ricoeur seems to be willing to just talk about time and narrative as general ideas. His use of Aristotle and Augustine were quite inspired. Like a radio, he tuned to the concept of narrative so as to highlight how time was used as an excuse to connect disparate things. His citing of narrative and metaphor as methods to justify understanding (the function of connecting two different things) was remarkable. From that point on, he could have spoke at length about anything he liked; after all what analysis, discursive or philosophy was not made to achieve understanding? But then, he turned to history as narrative.
History was an interesting maneuver as that field encompasses both time and narrative. Like his examination in the first part, he is able to use narrative as a high level organizational filter to scrub history so as to show how history is less about time than it is about narrative organization. I actually don’t have much to add, except that chapter 5 felt like the weakest part of the book. At all times Ricoeur’s analytical ability, and the range of his study was astounding and a little overwhelming. Still, at parts, he seems to meander, seems draw conclusions that feel a unclear as far as where he wants to go. This could be an issue with how he draws his analysis…often what he says and who he is quoting feels muddled. I am not complaining that I wanted less material. I don’t mind that he rag picks among different thinkers to support what he wants to say or that he mixes them together. I would have liked a little more structure to highlight what he wants us to take away.
As it is, the conclusion of second part didn’t add back to the first. He really only talks about history and time at the end of his conclusion, instead of wrapping back to Augustine and Aristotle. Perhaps this conclusion was meant to only be a conclusion for second part, not for the entire work.
At all points though, Ricoeur is eager to show us how narrative (and history) are forms of creating knowledge. We use time as an excuse to order objects of narrative (be it cultural, historical, social or otherwise). These different objects of narratives are fields of discourse that we use to ordain a master order to achieve unity in a concept, for example, the history of the Mediterranean or the history of Victorian England. The construction of these high level unities require the meshing of first and second order objects, which attain a dual status; their gap between what we see them and how they belonged to a time and place we have no access to, except through indirect semiotic objects. Their connection and quasi-status as objects was weaved through what Ricoeur calls historic intentionality… this intentionality not only doubles the objects in study they also create the supra-object of study, a unity whose grasp we take to be synonymous with understanding.
I think Ricoeur’s greater thesis seeks to explicate the what human understanding is, and so an analysis of history as narrative still lacks some higher level grasp on what history is as a totality as he also in the first part, is mired in the mechanics of emplotment and how the concept of time is the ground we use to bind temporal objects as greater unities (like narrative that we call justice). Beyond the immanent mechanisms of how these parts are ordered, how they work aesthetically, Ricoeur does not speak too much about the power of narrative or understanding… for example the role of history in greater society. We see that history is one kind of narrative that links other narratives through causal singular imputation rather than generic law (as with physics), but are there other orders that are not narrative? Is all understanding narrative? I think Ricoeur says yes. But he doesn’t go in this direction yet; he’s still talking about the narrative immanence, using the concept of narrative to demonstrate its essentiality in constructing temporal unity. Perhaps he will cover this along with other kinds of narratives in his second volume.
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