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Ricoeur on Time and Narrative: An Introduction to Temps et récit
“The object of this book,” writes William C. Dowling in his preface, “is to make the key concepts of Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative available to readers who might have felt bewildered by the twists and turns of its argument.” The sources of puzzlement are, he notes, many. For some, it is Ricoeur’s famously indirect style of presentation, in which the polarities of argument and exegesis seem so often and so suddenly to have reversed themselves. For others, it is the extraordinary intellectual range of Ricoeur’s argument, drawing on traditions as distant from each other as Heideggerian existentialism, French structuralism, and Anglo-American analytic philosophy. Yet beneath the labyrinthian surface of Ricoeur’s Temps et récit , Dowling reveals a single extended argument that, though developed unsystematically, is meant to be understood in systematic terms. Ricoeur on Time and Narrative presents that argument in clear and concise terms, in a way that will be enlightening both to readers new to Ricoeur and those who may have felt themselves adrift in the complexities of Temps et récit , Ricoeur’s last major philosophical work. Dowling divides his discussion into six chapters, all closely involved with specific arguments in Temps et récit : on mimesis, time, narrativity, semantics of action, poetics of history, and poetics of fiction. Additionally, Dowling provides a preface that lays out the French intellectual context of Ricoeur's philosophical method. An appendix presents his English translation of a personal interview in which Ricoeur, having completed Time and Narrative , looks back over his long career as an internationally renowned philosopher. Ricoeur on Time and Narrative communicates to readers the intellectual excitement of following Ricoeur’s dismantling of established theories and arguments―Aristotle and Augustine and Husserl on time, Frye and Greimas on narrative structure, Arthur Danto and Louis O. Mink on the nature of historical explanation―while coming to see how, under the pressure of Ricoeur’s analysis, these ideas are reconstituted and revealed in a new set of relations to one another.
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121 pages, Paperback
First published October 30, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
April 20, 2020
Obviously, I can't judge how reliable and sound this introduction to Paul Ricoeur's Time and Narrative, Volume 1 ("Temps et récit") is, since I haven't read anything from this French philosopher at all. I accept Dowling's introductory words, that Ricoeur's style is almost impossible to follow for the average reader, so thank him for this handy introduction.
Since the 1970s, narratives have been everywhere. In the slipstream of postmodernism the emphasize is more than ever on how narrative our approach to reality is. "Everything is a story" has become a common saying. And Ricoeur (but of course not only him) has made a big contribution to that. If I have understood this book correctly, his merit lies mainly in recognizing the special temporal character of stories: they are told 'forward', with actors who act without knowing the outcome, but through a narrator who in retrospect, so ‘backwards’ knows all too well what the future held in store.
Especially the determining role of the 'totum simul'-perspective, the overview of the temporal whole, indicates the strength of a narrative: it allows to capture reality in a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, and with seemingly free acting characters, so that the plot approach is not necessarily too coercive, controlling and therefore reductionistic (unless perhaps in extremely naturalistic stories). Using fiction, Ricoeur clearly sketches how the characters create their own reality that does not necessarily has logical and rational coherence and thus make open choices.
But at the same time I think he has to admit that the weakness of the narrative approach lies in that "knowing how it ends" of the narrator. And with that we are on the trail of historical thinking, which is almost always an "ex post facto" approach, and therefore inherently teleological; knowing the outcome cannot but colour the story. It is a paradox that we apparently cannot escape. More on this in my History-account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show....
Since the 1970s, narratives have been everywhere. In the slipstream of postmodernism the emphasize is more than ever on how narrative our approach to reality is. "Everything is a story" has become a common saying. And Ricoeur (but of course not only him) has made a big contribution to that. If I have understood this book correctly, his merit lies mainly in recognizing the special temporal character of stories: they are told 'forward', with actors who act without knowing the outcome, but through a narrator who in retrospect, so ‘backwards’ knows all too well what the future held in store.
Especially the determining role of the 'totum simul'-perspective, the overview of the temporal whole, indicates the strength of a narrative: it allows to capture reality in a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, and with seemingly free acting characters, so that the plot approach is not necessarily too coercive, controlling and therefore reductionistic (unless perhaps in extremely naturalistic stories). Using fiction, Ricoeur clearly sketches how the characters create their own reality that does not necessarily has logical and rational coherence and thus make open choices.
But at the same time I think he has to admit that the weakness of the narrative approach lies in that "knowing how it ends" of the narrator. And with that we are on the trail of historical thinking, which is almost always an "ex post facto" approach, and therefore inherently teleological; knowing the outcome cannot but colour the story. It is a paradox that we apparently cannot escape. More on this in my History-account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show....
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October 21, 2024If I have understood this book correctly, Ricoeur's great merit is that he has uncovered the special temporality of stories. Stories are made up of a beginning, middle and end, even though the story structure can sometimes be manipulated by the author/narrator. That course of the story in itself suggests a linear temporality, from the starting position to the end; think of a detective or a thriller. But Ricoeur discovered that there are more and very different temporalities at play: there is the temporality of the characters in the story, who act but cannot estimate the exact consequences of their actions and cannot see the future (though they always imagine one). This is the baseline of the story, and it progresses in a forward tempo. But then you have the (formal) storyteller/narrator, and he/she is on a completely different point of time: he/she knows how the story ends, knows the future, and so in fact tells the story from a backward temporality. For Ricoeur it is that final ending, that telos, that permeates the narrative and gives it its distinct character.
Right here Ricoeur quite logically draws a parallel with historical work. In the first place, he recognizes in a historical story all the characteristics of a real narrative: a beginning, middle and end with a progressive time lapse, in which not just a lot of facts are listed, but also order and interpretation are involved, because without that story structure those naked facts would remain meaningless. And a historian gets his/her interpretation par excellence through the conclusion of the facts; he/she knows how the past evolved into the present, so he/she knows the outcome, the telos, and is therefore comparable to a fictional storyteller. A historical view therefore always is a narrative for Ricoeur, and for him that has a great strength.
Postmodernists of the "linguistic turn" sometimes have an own take on this. In their version, a narrative is a construction, and the question is whether that construction can really approach reality. Applied to the past, some argued that this narrative with its own plot features is impossible to really cover the past, thus allowing an endlessly possibly number of reconstructions of the past. I will not go into that discussion here, but will suffice to say that those postmodernists have rightly warned about the construction aspect of historical stories, but that their conclusions are absolutely wrong.
As far as I can estimate from this introduction by Dowling, Ricoeur does not really address this issue (at least not in the book ‘Time and Narrative’). What interests me is the consequences of knowing the telos, the outcome of the story, for telling it. Because in historical studies we are confronted with a big issue. After all, the major trap of much historiographical work is that too much is argued in function of the final outcome; this is called the 'teleological trap'. I can understand that: historians mainly want to explain how and why something happened or evolved, and the focus is on statements/actions/processes that made these developments plausible. But then there’s the real threat of what Raymond Aron called the danger of "the retrospective illusion of fatality", a kind of tunnel vision in which what seemed surprising to contemporaries, was in retrospect ("ex post facto") unavoidable. Such a historical discourse, as in a fictional story, can be particularly strong, but it may also be misleading. Because everyone intuitively knows that what happens could have happened in a thousand different ways, or could have had very different outcomes, depending on small factors. That is the famous contingency of history.
Ricoeur here points to an element of transcendence in a narrative: there are not only the characters who act blindly forward, and a narrator who, afterwards, assembles the story according to the outcome/telos; for Ricoeur there is also an implicit narrator who looks much more broadly and can see an ending, a telos, that transcends both characters and narrator. To be clear: Ricoeur does not mean this transcendence in the religious sense, but as a kind of meta point of view. In Dowlings’s words: “Ricoeur's originality lies in having seen that the principle of transcendence holds as well for the narrator, who, in perceiving the world of the story from a 'totum simul' perspective, is projected as a unifying consciousness existing independently of the words on the page. It is the unity of this consciousness that is central to Ricoeur's conception. "
If I understand this correctly, this is a very abstract concept which for Ricoeur immediately indicates the essence of historical time. “Its time, as Ricoeur has taught us, is not the cosmic time of a universe oblivious to human existence, nor yet the time of an isolated consciousness that, as Walter Pater once said, keeps as a solitary prisoner its dream of the world. It is a third time of narrative that, belonging to narrative alone, alone gives back the image of a world of human concern. It is, Ricoeur thinks, the time in which humanity has been dwelling, as unconsciously as it breathes the air, since its appearance on the face of the earth. ”
I'm not sure what to think about this. After all, I have the impression that with this concept of "transcendence in immanence", Ricoeur does not really get away from a philosophical nominalist approach, in which that transcendence takes rather rigid forms. An indication of this is that if you look at the development of historiography, the meta points of view are also constantly evolving: for example, the French Revolution introduced a completely new way of looking at history (the famous break with the past, and the start of the progressive thinking), and in the same way the current climate debate fundamentally alters the course of looking at the past (and the future). So I have strong doubts whether Ricoeur's focus on narrativity and temporality is so universally applicable. Perhaps, to clear that up, I ought to read ‘Time and Narrative’ myself.
Right here Ricoeur quite logically draws a parallel with historical work. In the first place, he recognizes in a historical story all the characteristics of a real narrative: a beginning, middle and end with a progressive time lapse, in which not just a lot of facts are listed, but also order and interpretation are involved, because without that story structure those naked facts would remain meaningless. And a historian gets his/her interpretation par excellence through the conclusion of the facts; he/she knows how the past evolved into the present, so he/she knows the outcome, the telos, and is therefore comparable to a fictional storyteller. A historical view therefore always is a narrative for Ricoeur, and for him that has a great strength.
Postmodernists of the "linguistic turn" sometimes have an own take on this. In their version, a narrative is a construction, and the question is whether that construction can really approach reality. Applied to the past, some argued that this narrative with its own plot features is impossible to really cover the past, thus allowing an endlessly possibly number of reconstructions of the past. I will not go into that discussion here, but will suffice to say that those postmodernists have rightly warned about the construction aspect of historical stories, but that their conclusions are absolutely wrong.
As far as I can estimate from this introduction by Dowling, Ricoeur does not really address this issue (at least not in the book ‘Time and Narrative’). What interests me is the consequences of knowing the telos, the outcome of the story, for telling it. Because in historical studies we are confronted with a big issue. After all, the major trap of much historiographical work is that too much is argued in function of the final outcome; this is called the 'teleological trap'. I can understand that: historians mainly want to explain how and why something happened or evolved, and the focus is on statements/actions/processes that made these developments plausible. But then there’s the real threat of what Raymond Aron called the danger of "the retrospective illusion of fatality", a kind of tunnel vision in which what seemed surprising to contemporaries, was in retrospect ("ex post facto") unavoidable. Such a historical discourse, as in a fictional story, can be particularly strong, but it may also be misleading. Because everyone intuitively knows that what happens could have happened in a thousand different ways, or could have had very different outcomes, depending on small factors. That is the famous contingency of history.
Ricoeur here points to an element of transcendence in a narrative: there are not only the characters who act blindly forward, and a narrator who, afterwards, assembles the story according to the outcome/telos; for Ricoeur there is also an implicit narrator who looks much more broadly and can see an ending, a telos, that transcends both characters and narrator. To be clear: Ricoeur does not mean this transcendence in the religious sense, but as a kind of meta point of view. In Dowlings’s words: “Ricoeur's originality lies in having seen that the principle of transcendence holds as well for the narrator, who, in perceiving the world of the story from a 'totum simul' perspective, is projected as a unifying consciousness existing independently of the words on the page. It is the unity of this consciousness that is central to Ricoeur's conception. "
If I understand this correctly, this is a very abstract concept which for Ricoeur immediately indicates the essence of historical time. “Its time, as Ricoeur has taught us, is not the cosmic time of a universe oblivious to human existence, nor yet the time of an isolated consciousness that, as Walter Pater once said, keeps as a solitary prisoner its dream of the world. It is a third time of narrative that, belonging to narrative alone, alone gives back the image of a world of human concern. It is, Ricoeur thinks, the time in which humanity has been dwelling, as unconsciously as it breathes the air, since its appearance on the face of the earth. ”
I'm not sure what to think about this. After all, I have the impression that with this concept of "transcendence in immanence", Ricoeur does not really get away from a philosophical nominalist approach, in which that transcendence takes rather rigid forms. An indication of this is that if you look at the development of historiography, the meta points of view are also constantly evolving: for example, the French Revolution introduced a completely new way of looking at history (the famous break with the past, and the start of the progressive thinking), and in the same way the current climate debate fundamentally alters the course of looking at the past (and the future). So I have strong doubts whether Ricoeur's focus on narrativity and temporality is so universally applicable. Perhaps, to clear that up, I ought to read ‘Time and Narrative’ myself.
August 4, 2025
Begrijpelijke, goed geschreven inleiding, maar man! wat kan die Ricoeur ouwehoeren.
June 28, 2019
I tend to recommend reading original texts rather than secondary explications of them, but for Ricoeur I make an exception. I am no expert on Ricouer at all, but from my attempts at reading him, I gather that he goes very far out in digressions that really do not contribute to his main argument, and only make it troublesome to follow his points. I am very happy to have skipped reading over 1,000 pages of Ricouer's three volumes that compose Time and Narrative; and to have read this tidy 100 page explication by Dowling instead.
Dowling is a skillful, clear writer. He writes without excesses, draws in examples exactly when needed, and can beautifully sum up complex ideas of Augustine, Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger, among other interlocutors of Ricoeur.
Ricoeur's key idea is that our temporal experience is essentially structured in terms of narratives. Narratives, whether fictional or historical, involve a series of events that are causally related to one another in a special way. There is a telos, or conclusion of the story, that drives this causality. So while events in a narrative unfold in a temporally-forward manner, there is also a backwards-motion of the telos, an unrevealing to come in the future, that gives these events their significance and that explains their unfolding.
Ricoeur argues that this narrative structure is grounded in the structure of human action. A single action is also governed by its telos, and can be understood in as unfolding in a forwards and backwards manner. Ricoeur, however, doesn't examine the relationship between a narrative and its constitutive actions. This is unsatisfying. It seems intuitive that a narrative can essentially be understood as a very extended action involving many individual agents, and an analysis of this as analogue to an individual agent's action would be interesting.
Ricoeur argues that narratives are analogous to scientific theories on some respects. Scientific theories present lawful generalizations of causal relations between natural phenomena; they select out variables that have causal efficacy and their relation to the phenomenon that is object of explanation. Similarly, narratives determine the features of a situation that are salient and have bearing on agents and their actions; narratives show the relation of these features to these agents. Like how certain paradigm-defining theories can set boundaries on the production of further research, certain historical narratives can alter our sense of a collective destiny and influence the possibilities of our actions.
Dowling explicates these primary ideas, and more: he covers Ricoeur's view on the distinction between historical and fictional narrative; and on the contrast between time within a narrative, and time as experienced in our actual lives; among others. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in narrative, and more generally, the phenomenology of reading fiction, of time, or of remembering the past.
Dowling is a skillful, clear writer. He writes without excesses, draws in examples exactly when needed, and can beautifully sum up complex ideas of Augustine, Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger, among other interlocutors of Ricoeur.
Ricoeur's key idea is that our temporal experience is essentially structured in terms of narratives. Narratives, whether fictional or historical, involve a series of events that are causally related to one another in a special way. There is a telos, or conclusion of the story, that drives this causality. So while events in a narrative unfold in a temporally-forward manner, there is also a backwards-motion of the telos, an unrevealing to come in the future, that gives these events their significance and that explains their unfolding.
Ricoeur argues that this narrative structure is grounded in the structure of human action. A single action is also governed by its telos, and can be understood in as unfolding in a forwards and backwards manner. Ricoeur, however, doesn't examine the relationship between a narrative and its constitutive actions. This is unsatisfying. It seems intuitive that a narrative can essentially be understood as a very extended action involving many individual agents, and an analysis of this as analogue to an individual agent's action would be interesting.
Ricoeur argues that narratives are analogous to scientific theories on some respects. Scientific theories present lawful generalizations of causal relations between natural phenomena; they select out variables that have causal efficacy and their relation to the phenomenon that is object of explanation. Similarly, narratives determine the features of a situation that are salient and have bearing on agents and their actions; narratives show the relation of these features to these agents. Like how certain paradigm-defining theories can set boundaries on the production of further research, certain historical narratives can alter our sense of a collective destiny and influence the possibilities of our actions.
Dowling explicates these primary ideas, and more: he covers Ricoeur's view on the distinction between historical and fictional narrative; and on the contrast between time within a narrative, and time as experienced in our actual lives; among others. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in narrative, and more generally, the phenomenology of reading fiction, of time, or of remembering the past.
September 15, 2014
A very good introduction. Readable, yet profound.
April 25, 2025
I understood most of this book, it synthesized Ricouer's ideas on narrative pretty well and pointed out where his phenomenological inspirations came from, which was the point of why I was reading it. I don't think it'll make Time and Narrative easier to understand, but hey at least I'm trying.
December 2, 2025
É difícil pegar quais realmente são as ideias do Ricoeur para além do tema geral que elas querem explicar. Conhecendo o material original, é um livro bom o suficientemente.
December 10, 2012
This is a great book that encapsulates what Ricoeur does in three volumes -- accessible and clear!
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews