III 生きられる時間/語られる時間

抄録

It is widely accepted among sociologists that time is constitutive of human life and society. Nevertheless, it has often been claimed that sociological investigation lacks a theoretical focus on the temporal dimension of its subject matter. Our discipline seems to have problems in dealing with time in its own right. In this paper, I try to examine what this "problem" is.

Sociology has developed a perspective which explains social reality as an institution, or put differently, our ordinary experience of it as institutionally produced. Needless to say, from this perspective time appears to be one of the purest social institutions, as is clearly stated in E. Durkheim's last magnum opus. The institutional approach has been dominant in the field of "sociology of time," but recently it has been critically and reflexively attacked from two directions.

On the one hand, the phenomenology of time experience, from Augustine to Heidegger, shows that time is always and already lived prior to our recognition of it as an object. Furthermore, without the intentional acts of our body, the ordinary (institutional) time system could not function at all. According to P. Ricoeur, however, human time experience is not only lived but narrated, and, in spite of this, temporality and narrativity remain strangers. Therefore, on the other hand, we have to consider time in relation to narrating acts. Using his arguments as our first step, some features of "sociology as a modern narrative" will be tentatively touched upon.