Tricks of Time: Bergson, Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur in Search of Time, Self, and Meaning

Five - Creative Time

228 Five CreativeTime Time comes into it. / Say it. Say it./ The universe is made of stories, not of atoms. — Muriel Rukeyser, “The Speed of Darkness” TIME AND SELF This chapter consolidates the tripartite theme of time, self, and meaning by looking for the points of convergence and divergence throughout the thought of Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, and Ricoeur. The aim here is not to work toward a specific model but, rather, to understand how the three themes hold each other together in a bonded constellation centered around time. As the chart below indicates, only in Ricoeur, under the ardour of narrative time, is any bifurcation of the self absent. This bifurcation of self in both Bergson and Merleau-Ponty is the result of their attempts to detail an authentic “human” time without reference to any time external to the human subject. Such analyses attempt to stretch, unfold, and distend as many levels of temporality as necessary in hopes of reaching , by way of approximation, that which temporality left behind and cannot produce, namely, the autonomy of time with respect to movement (cosmic time). What falls victim to this impossible task is a unified sense of identity. The self must continually be bifurcated to accommodate the internal disparity in time perspectives that erupts at the existential level. This problem can also be read backwards. In holding Creative Time 229 duration or the lived body as the source of time, the figures of temporality exclusive to the self become split or bifurcated. Hence, pure duration is understood in contrast to chronicle time, which it derides, just as phenomenal time is understood in contrast to empirical time, which it cannot produce. In both the cases of Bergson and Merleau-Ponty, the result is not a mastery over the meaning of time, but the production of meaning at the level of world-time. We simply know more about ourselves in terms of freedom and the ambiguity of any meaning given their attempts to elucidate a specifically existential personal human time. For Ricoeur, Bergson, and Merleau-Ponty deepened the interpretative levels of time that can be described in any medium of narrative. This brings us back to the hermeneutical question of whose time we judge as the correct time of the self. For Ricoeur the answer is obvious — we must entertain the conflict of interpretations that will encourage the further production of meaning. The prize of a poetical solution to time through the auspices of narrative is our seemingly infinite creative capacity to generate meaning within the span of temporal finitude. This recognition is not theoretical as much as it is part of the wider historical consciousness that stands behind every writer in every generation who takes the initiative to explore and enlighten the mystery of our temporal passage. The Present — The Link Between Time and Self As we learned emphatically from Bergson, outside of clock-time, time is change. From Merleau-Ponty we learned that the lived body defies Time Self Meaning Bergson – durée – superficial self – freedom réelle – profound self Merleau- – phenomenal – phenomenal body – (freedom) Ponty present – ambiguous self – contingent Ricoeur – narrated or – narrative self – emergent within human time historical present 230 Tricks of Time a strict dichotomy of the physical and the psychical, of change and nonchange . Change can only be recognized from some point of “nonchange .” Meanwhile, Ricoeur taught us that to speak of change is to understand that there exists a narrator that can thematize the reality of change within a certain historical present. In the chain of natural causes, the only category totally peculiar to change is the temporal present of the self. In Aristotle’s Physics, the autonomy of time is dealt with in respect to movement. In light of physis and the need to protect the dimension of change from human interference, Aristotle concentrates on the anonymous “now” point, distinguishing the “before” and the “after,” failing to recognize the necessity of a discriminating “soul” or a mediating functionary that employs the operations of perception, discrimination , and comparison. While it is one thing to employ time for the measurement of motion, as Aristotle does, it is another thing to ask what precisely is being employed and to attempt its thematization. In reply to his plea, “What, then, is time?,” Augustine recognizes the “present” as a fundamentally unique characteristic of human temporal existence. Human temporal observation occurs in the...