P. Ricoeur’s Mimetic Circleas a Tool for Representing of the Past

Abstract

To date, the attempts to justify the reliability of the historical knowledge have come to a contradiction: if history is a story about causally-interconnected events, then its assertions are unverifiable, and if history claims to be evaluatedfor truth, it should only establish the facts. We believe that this contradiction remains unresolved, because all the arguments about historical knowledge remain intexts while as a distinction between historical narratives and fictional ones should be sought not in the narrative itself, but in the interaction between the narrative and social reality. In the article we consider Paul Ricoeur’s mimetic circle as a tool for analysis of this interaction. The article traces the work of mimesis at each of the steps on its way from action to text. Analyzing the transitions between the phases of mimesis, it becomes clear that the mimetic circle is a set of processes nested into each other that occur at different levels. The proposed concept of mimesis levels makes it possible to show how narrative schemes are formed, how their capability is enhanced to represent processes and an increasing number of factors.