Plot Against the Clock: Ricoeur and the Weaving of Time

Like air in the lungs, like gravity beneath the foot, like truth behind the word… time saturates us. We breathe it, we spend it, we are spent by it—yet name it we cannot without remainder.

Augustine called it a distention of the soul: the mind stretched between memory and expectation, a harp strung taut between what has been and what may be. Husserl listened more closely still: not the clock on the wall, but the melody in the mind—the lingering echo of the just-past note (retention), the hovering outline of the next (protention), the willed recall that gathers absence into presence. Heidegger turned the inquiry inside out: not that we are in time, but that time is the clearing in which we are. Thrown, projected, finite—toward death we run, and by that running are defined.

Yet beside this inward pulse stands another measure: the long arithmetic of the cosmos. Fourteen billion years since the first flare of matter; ten billion until a cooling earth; six thousand inscribed in script and stone. Years since the birth of Jesus of Nazareth; days from equinox to equinox; seconds ticking like a metronome indifferent to longing. We count the stars, we count our birthdays—the same word, count, binds abyss and cradle. A synecdoche of digits for destiny.

Two times, then: lived and measured, distended and numbered, the soul’s trembling and the physicist’s line. They coexist; they do not coincide. Here lies the aporia that haunted the three volumes of Time and Narrative: how shall the trembling chord and the cosmic ledger speak to one another?

Ricoeur’s answer arrives quietly, almost modestly—emplotment. Not solution but configuration; not synthesis imposed, but concordance wrested from discord. Narrative gathers scattered instants, confers a before and after, arranges chance into consequence. Event and structure, character and law, accident and necessity—through plot they are not erased but composed. We do not escape time by telling stories; we enter it more fully. We configure time, and time refigures us.

From Aristotle’s mythos to Augustine’s confession, from Husserl’s retention to Heidegger’s ecstatic temporality, Ricoeur performs his own emplotment: a weaving in which phenomenology and cosmology, fiction and history, analysis and faith, cross and recross. He shows that cosmic time becomes humanly intelligible only when narrated, and that lived time becomes shareable only when inscribed in a world’s chronology. We tell stories to measure time; time measures us by the stories we can bear to tell.

His prose itself enacts the thesis—sentences bending unexpectedly, arguments detouring like rivers seeking their sea. In an age of algorithmic predictability, such discursiveness feels almost ethical… a refusal of the straight line in favor of the configured whole.

Philosophy has always sought the self; Ricoeur reminds us that the self is temporal, and temporality narrative. Not the clock alone, not the soul alone—but the plot that binds them.

We are not merely in time; we are its telling.