TIME AND NARRATIVE VOLUME 3 pdf download

Time And Narrative Volume 3 Paul Ricoeur

TIME AND NARRATIVE VOLUME 3

In the current state of the discussion about a philosophy of history, it is usually- taken for granted that the only choice is between speculation regarding universal history, in a Hegelian form, or epistemology of the writing of history, as in French historiography or English-language analytic philosophy of history.

A third option, arising from our rumination on the aporias of the phenomenology of time consists in reflecting upon the place of historical time between phenomenological time and the time phenomenology does not succeed in constituting, which we call the time of the world, objective lime, or ordinary time.

History initially reveals its creative capacity as regards the reconfiguration of time through its invention and use of certain reflective instruments such as the calendar; the idea of the succession of generations—and, connected to this, the idea of the threefold realm of contemporaries, predecessors, and successors; finally, and above all, in its recourse to archives, documents, and traces.

These reflective instruments are noteworthy in that they play the role of connectors between lived time and universal time. In this respect, they bear witness to the poetic function of history insofar as it contributes to solving the aporias of time.

However, their contribution to the hermeneutics of historical consciousness only appears at the end of a reflective inquiry that no longer stems from the epistemology of historical knowledge. For historians, these connectors are, as 1 said, just intellectual tools.

They make use of them without inquiring into their conditions of possibility—or rather, their conditions of significance.

These conditions are revealed only if we relate the functioning of these connectors to the aporias of time, something historians historians need not consider.