Abstract
What is the relation between the imaginary and the real constituting our paramount reality? The article approaches the cleavage between fiction and facts by interrogating the genesis of meaning as this genesis is brought about by fictitious works of memory and commemoration. Narrative structures prove to be the intersubjective ground for comprehensive action insofar narration mediates between past and future, and thus gives way to appresent the non-present in collective actions. Further on, narratively we are bound to life world and are indebted to it with an ethical strain of our Self as we gain our identity exactly by narration.
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Notes
- 1.
The concrete and singular expression of life gains coherency and unity in biographical courses of life. Presenting a unity according to selections in the relevance of biographical data, nothing could be added or taken away from a life’s history without altering the uniqueness of it, at the same time a singular life mirrors historical universality in its meaning and intentionality: “Der Sinn des Lebens liegt in der Gestaltung, in der Entwicklung; von hier aus bestimmt sich die Bedeutung der Lebensmomente auf eine eigene Weise; sie ist zugleich erlebter Eigenwert des Momentes und dessen wirkende Kraft. Jedes Leben hat einen eigenen Sinn. Er liegt in einem Bedeutungszusammenhang, in welchem jede erinnerbare Gegenwart einen Eigenwert besitzt, doch zugleich im Zusammenhang der Erinnerung eine Beziehung zu einem Sinn des Ganzen hat. Dieser Sinn des individuellen Daseins ist ganz singulär, dem Erkennen unauflösbar, und er repräsentiert doch in seiner Art, wie eine Monade von Leibniz, das geschichtliche Universum” (Dilthey 1956, p. 199).
- 2.
Cf. below, pp. 178.
- 3.
Cf. Löwith’s four implications of understanding life (Löwith 1979).
- 4.
Cf. Schapp (2004, p. 126): “Anscheinend können wir nur über unsere eigenen Geschichten, über ihre Art und Weise, wie wir sie bestehen, wie wir in ihnen verstrickt sind, wie die Verstrickungen zustande kommen, sich lockern oder unentwirrbar werden, zu uns selbst kommen. Es handelt sich dabei nicht um eine künstliche Selbstbetrachtung oder um das, was die Psychologen unter Selbstbetrachtung verstehen mögen, sondern um eine ‚Versenkung’ in die eigenen Geschichten in der Weise, daß auf diese Geschichten sich neue aufbauen.”
- 5.
Cf. below pp. 6 and 18.
- 6.
Cf. below: p. 19.
- 7.
I see here a concretization of Schutz’s short notion on reconstitution of experience: “Besides, naturally intersubjective thematic relevances can be used again and again in the verification of the congruence of the schemata of experience and explication ‘brought into’ a We-relation by the partners. This plays an important role, especially in situations where (for one reason or another) language ‘breaks down’” (Schutz and Luckmann 1974, p. 255).
- 8.
I hold forth about Ricoeur’s analyses about the differences between historiographical and fictional types of mimetic narration: Both of them are similar in their basic structure of expressing reality, since both of them aim at reception of this figurate reality, taking it up and consummating it by relating the story to a realm of praxis in its temporality.
- 9.
E.g. the commemorative act where such multiple realities are reflected in their incoherency and finally, in their possible relations.
- 10.
Cf. E. Straus: The gnostic moment is related to the qualitative side of perceiving objects, or the what of meaning being displayed in perception; the pathic moment is related to the how of the givenness of our world.
Sympathetic relationship is due to our sensing, prior to the gnostic intentional mode of perceiving. Cf. Straus 1956 esp. pp. 329–350.
- 11.
The face-to-face-relations of the past transcends the existence of consociates within the paramount reality.
- 12.
The anthropological archetype of biography is the commemoration of the dead – as fundament for cultural mnemotechniques but also as motivation for individual (autobiographical) memory (cf. Assmann 1992, p. 33).
- 13.
Cf.: “The dividing line between the world of my contemporaries and that of my predecessors is not sharp. I can surely view all memories of my own experiences of Others as experience of past social reality. Indeed, as we have just remarked, the constitutive characteristics of these experiences are preserved in such memories. These are experiences in which Others were present in simultaneity with my life” (Schutz and Luckmann 1974, pp. 88f.).
- 14.
Cf. below., footnote 16.
- 15.
Finite insofar as this reality is attached to one intimate personality only or to a time gone by which is sealed within a person’s memory.
- 16.
Sometimes, these different worlds merge into each other within our narrative preoccupation. Again, Gesine gives an example for this, looking for faces of her German past in the streets of Manhattan, arguing with characters of the story she told her daughter the last night, sometimes aloud; whenever she notices this, she ashamedly tries to explain to people present around her.
- 17.
The everyday life which is lived through pre-predicatively gains a temporal structure and a rough form by the means and ends of our acting. Nevertheless, it is not yet a story with a back- and foreground, against which it stands out as particular and memorable. Only then it would become a fabula – ready to be narratable.
- 18.
A plot is a discursive structure when the narratable story becomes narrated, when the simple structure of “inacted time” (b after a) becomes complex – not only due to reasons and effects but to possibilities of what has or might have happened, of what might happen in the future; and of course of what and why might be remembered or forgotten and of what might be narrated now and especially: what might be narrated how.
- 19.
“Du wirst von mit sagen können: Meine Mutter war eine ziemlich unordentliche Person. […] Wäre aber gern ordentlich gewesen, unbeeinflußt von Biograpie und Vergangenheit, mit richtigem Leben, in einer richtigen Zeit, mit den richtigen Leuten, zu einem richtigen Zweck. Ich kenne die Vorschriften” (Johnson 1993 II, p. 889).
- 20.
Cf. Riordan (1989, esp. p. 65) for the documentary background.
- 21.
The German text has “experience” as a general noun: “Erst wer in der Erfahrung lebt und von da aus in die Phantasie ‚hineinfaßt’, wobei das Phantasierte mit dem Erfahrenen kontrastiert, kann die Begriffe Fiktion und Wirklichkeit haben” (Husserl 1999, Par 74a, S. 360).
- 22.
Cf. Schutz: “[…] in order to explain the inconsistencies between two sub-universes, we have to resort to the interpretational rules constitutive of a third one” (Schutz 1964, p. 155).
- 23.
Cf. Schutz on this difference: “The relative-natural world view, viz., the social categories of biographical articulation which are contained in it, are in contrast experienced by the individual as something in the life-world to be overcome, as belonging to the potential zone of operation surrounding his life. The categories of biographical articulation are thus not boundary conditions of the lifeworldly situation, but are possibilities for leading life within this situation” (Schutz and Luckmann 1974, p. 94).
- 24.
In Anniversaries the photographs displayed in the “New York Times” Gesine and Mary come by each day and discuss for their intention to display atrocities in Vietnam and their justification or abolishment, lead Gesine to choose occurrences of her life 30 years ago: refiguring this time, illustrating what she only has pre-narrative memory of and what also is out of range to experience for Mary herself (a dead body, burning houses after a bomb-attack).
- 25.
Cf. about the role which “intersubjective thematic relevances play in ‘socialization’ of the interpretational and motivational relevances”: “even if we assume that the latter context, in which a particular theme is first given to partners in a we-relation, is different, not only is the attentional advertence (to the ‘same’ theme) co-apprehended in the processes of intersubjective mirroring, but so also is the kind of gras** and, at least in rudimentary form, the kind of interpretation on the part of the partner.” (ibid.).
- 26.
Even those Gesine does not know about much but can only speculate about their histories, motives, perspectives in the narration that unfolds between daughter and mother.
- 27.
Cf.: “Here we are at the transition from the imposed to the ‘open’ elements of the situation. I can no longer change the previous history of the situation, but within the present situation there are elements which I can influence, which I can change” Schutz and Luckmann 1974, p. 114).
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Hilt, A. (2014). Entangled into Histories or the Narrative Grounds of Multiple Realities. In: Barber, M., Dreher, J. (eds) The Interrelation of Phenomenology, Social Sciences and the Arts. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 69. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01390-9_13
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