Ricoeur, Paul (1913–2005)

The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, who taught at the Sorbonne and the universities of Nanterre and Strasbourg as well as at the University of Chicago, [Page 1109]attained an international reputation for his work, particularly in the fields of phenomenology and hermeneutics. He is widely regarded as among the foremost philosophers of the 20th century.

The main part of Paul Ricoeur's reflections on time is presented in his three-volume work Temps et récit, published in French between 1983 and 1985 (in English translation, Time and Narrative, 1984–1988). Everyone is familiar with Saint Augustine's famous remark: “What, then, is time? I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled” (Confessions, XI, 14). Ricoeur took Augustine's statement very seriously, maintaining the irremediably aporetic character of philosophical reflection on time: There is an aporeticity of temporality, which means that when philosophers think about time, they run up against aporiasthat is, insurmountable difficulties that cannot be resolved through standard philosophical frameworks. In fact, Time and Narrative presents three theses at once. The first is expressed negatively: There is no philosophical answer to the nature of time. Even contemporary phenomenology, begun by Husserl, failed in its attempts to resolve the aporias raised by the problem of time. Moreover, Ricoeur himself gives no general definition of time in his work.

Ricoeur's second thesisthis time expressed positivelyclaims that it is narrative, the act of retelling, that provides an answer to the aporias of the problem of time, an answer that is poetic and not speculative. This explains the title Time and Narrative. Narrative is the guardian of time. It is defined with the help of two concepts borrowed from Aristotle's Poetics. These are mimesis, that is, the representation of action, and muthos, the “emplotment,” the synthesis of aims, causes, and chance brought together under temporal unity in a complete action. To tell a story is to unify through a single narrative thread successive events that are, at the outset, distinct or even disparate. Narrative is therefore the “guardian of time” in the sense that it transforms anonymous time into human time. Narrative gives a consistency, a cohesiveness to our experience of time.

The third thesis is that this role of narrative is as valuable for historical narrative as for fictional narrative (literature). There is a crisscrossing between history and fiction that is not reducible to a mere fusion of genres. Far from being two completely separate genres, history and literature share a common center, which is the activity of telling stories with reference to temporality. History is a true narrative of the past. Fiction is an imaginative narrative that can take time as its object. (Here, Ricoeur analyzes three examples: Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, and Proust's Remembrance of Things Past). The time of narration is “narrated time.” In one respect, it is about time having become the object of the narrative, being actively involved in a story (fiction), practically becoming a character in the novel. In another respect, narrated time is the time of events reinscribed in a chronology (history).

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