Ricoeur’s work is not focussed primarily on setting out a theory of narrative and its significance for philosophy, but rather on how human beings live with the enigma of time. A theory of narrative is a bi-product of his examination of how humans exist within time.

The Problem With Time #

The problem with time arises in trying to describe it. What actually is it? Is it something? Or is it not something? The being or non-being of time is the fundamental underlying aporia of the whole enigma, the thing that makes it incomprehensible and irresolvable.¹

If it exists then it can in some way be measured, but measuring time is difficult, ironically so since we have so many devices to do it.

The problem with measuring it is that ‘the future is not yet, the past is no longer, and the present does not remain,’ Ricoeur argues.²

As soon as one tries to ascribe some sort of length to time then it has gone directly from the present into the past and is no longer. Obviously, then, the only time that can be called present is a point-like instant, but as soon as that is present it has gone. The present has no duration, so it cannot exist, and time has no being.³ Yet, of course, that does not accord with everyday experience, and experience holds sway over this profound skepticism.

It is language, in collaboration with experience, that resists skepticism.

It is language, in collaboration with experience, that resists skepticism. Language sustains the things that have passed and the things that are still to come; language gives them body, but it gives them body in the present. It is not the past and the future that exist in themselves but ‘the temporal qualities that can exist in the present, without the things of which we speak, when we recount them or predict them, still existing or already existing.’⁴ In other words:

The present contains an anticipation of what is to come, a memory of what has just passed, and the experience of what is presently occurring, all equally present, all necessarily present.

This is Ricoeur’s notion of the threefold present.

The Aporia Remains #

The aporia arises because this description is not applied to the thing itself, time, but to the way language gives an account of the experience of time. It is not a pure phenomenology of time, even though it is phenomenological in its description of human experience.

Time itself is aporetic, indescribable.⁵

The Aporia Intensifies #

The aporia is intensified in contrasting the dimensions of time in human experience.

Firstly, humans live within the context of ‘cosmic time,’ the implacable, unyielding, remorseless passage of time, untouched by the to-and-fro of humanity.

And yet, secondly, human beings do not live with their eye on the time of the cosmos, what Ricoeur calls the ‘time of the world,’ but rather within ‘human time,’ the time of an ordinary human life, with memories, ancestors, traces, anticipations, expectations, plans and the like, what Ricoeur calls the ‘time of the soul.’⁶

One of the primary functions of narration is to play with time in order to make it habitable, responding to the aporia of time with a poetic solution.

Looking too hard at the former illustrates so starkly the inconsequence of an ordinary human life that despair would be an inevitable consequence, and yet human beings do not habitually despair. Instead, we humanise cosmic time in order that it becomes habitable.⁷

This is one of the primary functions of narration, to play with time in order to make it habitable, responding to the aporia of time ‘with a poetic solution.’⁸

Narrated time selects certain events as ‘of importance’ for the story being told, and rejects others as irrelevant.⁹ Each narrator chooses their own set of events, even if they are narrating the same occurrence, because what one person deems to be significant is different for another person.

The prefiguration of a story narrated is determined by the sum of the stories, novels, plays, newspaper articles, jokes, and all other tales that have gone before in that person’s experience. It determines how they go about selecting which events are worthy of inclusion and which are not. In short, the prefiguration of the story determines the particular configuration of time in the story.¹⁰

Narrated time changes the structure of the cosmos, making its shape more human, choosing some events to leave in, others to leave out, joining some together in sequence which in another story have no connection at all.¹¹

In this way, poetic language is able to describe the indescribable, and this is the key point for this study.¹² Narratives shape and reshape time and in doing so describe what purely descriptive language can never do: help us to understand what time is.¹³

It seems logical to suggest that if the poetic language of narrative is the appropriate response to the impassable enigma par excellence of time, narrative would be a similarly pertinent response to other aporias, like death, love, suffering, happiness, solidarity, truth, inequality, fidelity, sin or forgiveness.¹⁴

We tell stories to try to bring meaning at a human scale to the implacable time of the cosmos.

For Ricoeur, they are always stories about time — trying to bring meaning at a human scale to the implacable time of the cosmos — yet they also help us to bring meaning to to that which cannot be understood with purely descriptive language.

With that in mind, having considered the aporetic nature of time and poetic language as the necessary response, we must next examine how Ricoeur explores the way narratives wrestle with time.

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Photo credits #

Nathan Anderson on Unsplash
David Huang on Unsplash
Micah Williams on Unsplash

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