Ricoeur Reading Augustine on Time

Paul Ricouer Reading Augustine on Time

distentio animi

"The notion of distentio animi has not been given its due so long as the passivity of the impression has not been contrasted with the activity of a mind stretched in opposite direction, between expectation, memory, and attention. Only a mind strecthed in such different directions can be distended. "(TN1:18)

"The distentio is then nothing other than the shift in, the non-coincidence of the three modalities of action: "and the scope of action which I am performing is divided [distenditur] between the two faculties of memory and expectation, the one looking back to the part which I have already recited, and the other looking forward to the part which i have still to recite." (TN1:20)

"Thus, if we compare, as I believe we can, the passivity of the affectio to that of the distentio animi, we must say that the three temporal intentions are separeate from one another to the extent that intentional activity has as its counterpart the passivity engendered by this very activity and that, for lack of a better name, we designate as impression-image or sign-image. It is not only these three acts that do not coincide, but also the activity and passivity which oppose one another, to say nothing of the discordance btween the two passivities, the one related to the expectation, the other to memory. Therefore, the more the mind makes itself intentio, the more it suffers distentio." (TN1: 21)

Measurement of time (some justififications):
"1)that what is measured is neither future things nor past things, but their expectations and memory; 2) that these are affections presenting a measurable spatiality of a unique kind: 3) that these affections are like the reverse side of the activity of the mind that continues; and finally 4) that this action is itself threefold and thus is distended whenever and wherever it is tensively engaged in." (TN1:21)


Concern of emplotment on Speculation on Time
"Augustine's inestimable discovery is, by reducing the extension of time to the distention of the soul, to have tied this distention to the slippage that never ceases to find its way into the heart of the threefold present--between the present of the future, the present of the past, and th present of the present. In this way he sees discordance emerge again and again out of the very concordance of the intentions of expectation, attention and memory.

It is to this enigma of the speculation on time that the poetic act of emplotment replies...It puts it to work--poetically--by producing in inverted figure of discordance and concordance." (TN1:21-22)

Eternity and Time
"Eternity is "for ever still [semper stans]" in contrast to things that are "never still." This stillness lies in the fact that in "eternity nothing moves into the past: all is present [totum esse praesens]. Time on the other hand, is never all present at once" (11:13)... In order to push as far as possible the reflection on the distentio animi, that is, on the slippage of of the threefold present, it must be compared to a present with neither past nor future." (TN1: 25)

"It is the recoil effect of this "comparison" on the living experience of the distentio animi that makes the thought of eternity the limiting idea against the horizon of which the experience of the distentio animi receives, on the ontological level, the negative mark of a lack or a defect in being." (TN1:26)

Defect to Lamentation of Distentio Animi
"The contrast between eternity and time is not limited to sorrounding ouor experience of time with negativity, as we do when we link our thought of time to what is other than time. This experience is permeated through and through with negativity. Intensified in this way on the existential level, the experience of distention is raised to the level of lamentation. the outline of this new contrast is contained in the admirable prayer of 2:3 already mentioned. The hymn includes the lamentation, and the confessio brings them both to the level of language." (TN1:26-27)

"... lamentation unashamedly displays the author's feelings." (27)

distentio animi after its comparison with eternity
"Distentio animi no longer provides just the solution to the aporia of the measurement of time. It now expresses the way in which the soul, deprived of the stillness of the eternal present, is torn asunder:" (27)

"of course, when the dialectic of intentio and distentio is definitively anchored in that of eternity and time

intensification of distention and intention: deepening of time
"the theme of distention and intention acquires from its setting within the meditation on eternity and time an intensification that will be echoed in all the follows in the present work. This intensification does not just consist of the fact that time is thought of as abolished by the limiting idea of an eternity that strikes time with nothingness. Nor is this intensification reduced to transferring in to the sphere of lamentation and wailing that had until then been only a speculative argument. It aims more fundamentally at extracting from the very experience of time the resources of an internal heirachization, one whose advantage lies not in abolishing time but in deepening it." (TN1:30)

If it is true that the tendency of modern theory of narrative--in historiography and the philosophy of history as well as in narratology--is to "dechronologize" narrative, the struggle against the linear representation of time does not necessarily have as its sole outcome the turning of narrative into "logic", but rather may deepen its temporality. (30)