Abstract
Aristotle and Immanuel Kant related time to objective categories such as succession, calculation, irreversibility, and space. Augustine and Edmund Husserl, to the contrary, associated time with recollection, experience, and expectation. They contended that time was a phenomenon of human consciousness and therefore a subjective concept. French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (b. 1913) has tried to reconcile both perspectives. In a historical narrative, more or less objective temporalities, such as chronology, are related to subjective phenomena, such as developing identities. Developing identity is so crucial in Ricoeur's conception of temporality that it must be regarded as subjectifying time. Ricoeur illustrates this perspective using French historian Fernand Braudel's famous Mediterranean study (1949). However, Braudel's own interpretation of his book reveals a conception of time in which space plays the most important role, which indicates that Braudel uses time as an objectifying category. In sum, Ricoeur does not succeed in integrating both temporalities, but what philosophy cannot accomplish history does. In its argumentational structure, history allows for an objectifying time, while the plot in the historical narrative leaves room for a subjectifying time.