Overriding an aporia of time in Paul Ricoeur’s “Time and Narrative”. Part One

Abstract

The paper considers overriding an aporia of time as presented in the third volume of Paul Ricoeur’s “Time and Narrative”.
The formulation of an issue is considered according to Ricoeur, the phenomenological descriptions are not sufficient for constituting the objective time based on the time of consciousness. The narrative poetics solves the issue. Ricoeur observes the following techniques that bridge the objective and psychological time: a calendar, a change of generations, an archive, a document, a trace. Within the article, only the first method is considered. Ricoeur’s approach is based on two assumptions. First, the subject and object of history for him is primarily a person; one of the basic qualities of a person is the ability to narrate. Secondly, time does not exist in isolation from the human narrative and is a human dimension.
The calendar is a form of the human relation to the time. It does not boil down only to those conditions, but has its own key feature. On the one hand, it is founded on the myth and ritual, establishing an original coherence between the cosmological and human time. On the other hand, the calendar is based on the astronomical and phenomenological time, and the first one correlates the dates with the movement of celestial bodies, the second one endows it with the notion of the present (today). The calendar does not boil down only to those conditions, but has its own key feature: it organizes historical time through “axial moment” (extraordinary historical event) special event in relation to which other events are ordered.
In the conclusion several questions on the Ricoeur’s theory are posed. Since the narrative itself can be determined by something non-verbal, is its analysis sufficient for resolution of the issue? Is the aporia not eliminated at the level of the original premise: time does not exist apart from the narrative?