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PARTISAN REVIEW
events. Ricoeur takes great pains to show how Hempel and Braudel
not only fail in their criticisms, but actually rely on a sort of "nar–
rative competence" for their own accounts of historical explanation.
To a large degree, says Ricoeur, the narrative form suffers at
the hands of critics such as Hempel and Braudel because they see
only its episodic or linear dimension, the "and then, and then, and
then." In order to appropriate the positive insights of Hempel and
Braudel, Ricoeur has recourse to what he calls the "configurative
dimension" of the plot. Ricoeur claims that narratives display a
teleological unity as well, which is the product of the plot's power to
grasp or "configure" diverse actions and events in a temporal whole.
Ricoeur is just as careful not to go to the "narrativist" extreme
in historiography. Some Anglo-American philosophers, such as Ar–
thur Danto, W. B. Gallie, Louis O. Mink, and Hayden White, have
tried to reclaim the narrative form as a cognitive instrument which
yields a unique type of explanation, appropriate to historical events
and processes. Though Ricoeur integrates many of their insights into
his own narrative theory, he does not insist on a direct connection
between historiography and narrative. Histories do not have to be
written in an explicitly narrative form, but they must proceed from
what Ricoeur calls a "narrative competence," the competence to
"follow" stories, which is common to both history and fiction.
Part Two of Volume One is an extended defense of this fun–
damental "narrative competence" of history. Ricoeur believes that "if
history were to break every connection to
our basic narrative competence
for following a story
and to the cognitive operations constitutive of our
narrative understanding ... it would lose its distinctive place in the
chorus of the social sciences." According to Ricoeur, the narrative
form is not simply an ornament of historical discourse, pretty packag–
ing which makes the contents more attractive. Rather, the narrative
form is a
cognitive instrument
in its own right, and historical understand–
ing is that type of understanding which proceeds by inventing plots.
To understand the actions of people in the past, we need to be able
to tell and to follow stories. Various factors, settings, characters and
events can be put into one history thanks to the unifying operation of
the plot, its power of putting things together. This narrative config–
uration, this "seeing together," bears a close resemblance to what
Kant called "judgment" in his third
Critique.
This similarity to Kant
is not coincidental, for Kant is never far behind in Ricoeur's works.
Ricoeur would agree with Kant that "pure" or speculative reason
cannot "explain" the human experience of time. But in the spirit of
