Abstract
In this essay, I argue that Paul Ricoeur’s theories of mimesis and metaphor provide important resources with which one can talk sensibly about the truth of a dramatic work These theories give one grounds for claiming that the truth of a dramatic work is positively correlated with its importance. Conversely, the trivial work is one which lacks truth.
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References
Tom Stoppard, “Artist Descending a Staircase,” in Albert’s Bridge and Other Plays ( New York: Grove Press, 1973 ), 86.
Plato, Republic,nos. 377–403.
Let me suggest in passing that, mutatis mutandis, Ricoeur’s theories of metaphor also shed light on how political practice can lay claim to rational validity or truth. Because politics involves the exercise of the social imagination, its truth will also be “tensive.” It can be true to the extent that it honors its origins, its founding deeds, while at the same time it responds to the exigencies of its specific present context. To my knowledge, Ricoeur does not himself make this claim. But his Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, among others, prompt me to offer this suggestion. I expect to develop this suggestion elsewhere. See his Lectures on Ideology and Utopia ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1986 ).
Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Man and Language,” in his Philosophical Hermeneutics,tr. and ed. by David E. Linge (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), 65. My emphasis. Ricoeur would, I think, have reservations about the two other essential features of language described by Gadamer here. I would.
Ricoeur’s concept of mimesis is found particularly clearly expressed in his “Mimesis and Representation,” Annals of Scholarship,2.2 (1982): 15–32. He also treats it extensively in Time and Narrative,Vol. I, tr. by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). I incorporate references to them into my text. MR refers to the former, TN to the latter.
Ricoeur says: “We lack a sufficiently multivocal concept of truth.…It is not even certain that Heidegger’s substitution of truth as manifestation for truth as adequation responds to what mimesis demands of our thinking about truth. For is it still a matter of manifestation, there where there is a fitting production? Mimesis,in this sense, is ahead of our concepts of reference, the real, and truth. It thus engenders a need as yet unfilled to think more.” (MR, 31).
Ricoeur spells out his theory of metaphor in three principal texts. They are: a) Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: The Texas Christian University Press, 1976); b) The Rule of Metaphor,translated by Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1977); and c) “The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling,” in On Metaphor,ed. by Sheldon Sacks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). For convenience I will refer to these works as IT, RM, and OM. References to them are incorporated into my text. I have previously examined these works from another perspective. See my “Ricoeur’s Metaphor Theory and Some of its Consequences,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 21.1 (1983): 1–12. Hereafter RMT.
See also in this connection Ricoeur’s important paper, “The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality,” Man and the World 12 (1979): 123–141.
I realize that many great works, including Shakespeare’s, had no canonical text definitively fixed by the playwright. Nonetheless, if the text indeed has unity, then some phrases and sentences show that they fit within it and other possible candidates are simply incongruous. To be sure there is room for a large thoroughly gray area. But to the extent that a dramatic work has a discernible unity, it can properly be taken to control its several parts. On the metaphoric character of a drama as a whole, see August W. Staub, et. al., Varieties of Theatrical Art (Raleigh: Contemporary Publishing Co., 1980 ), 83, 98.
See in this connection Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue ( Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1981 ), 89–96.
A dramatic work may have historical importance of some sort without having importance precisely as drama.
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© 1993 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Dauenhauer, B.P. (1993). Truth in Drama. In: Blosser, P., Shimomissé, E., Embree, L., Kojima, H. (eds) Japanese and Western Phenomenology. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 12. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8218-6_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8218-6_12
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