XMCA Mail 2001_05: Re: On time

These files are maintained strictly for historical reference, research, and recordkeeping purposes,
and the content has not been altered or updated since archiving.
Content on this site may not meet current digital accessibility standards.
If you require an alternative, accessible format of any information found on this site,
please contact Bruce Jones, bjones@ucsd.edu to request an accommodation.

Re: On time

Thank you very much Paul,
specially to spend some of your precious time answering my querries.

>Ricardo,
>
>I have always been fascinated with the question of time and not so long ago
>on xmca we time in relation to Jay Lemke's paper, during the course of
which
>we also peered briefly at Bergson's distinction of lived time v. linear
>time. Heidegger's deconstruction of Aristotelian time in Fundamental
>Problems of Phenomenology is, in my opinion, one of the most lucid
>demonstrations of the peculiarity of the "Western" concept of time that
>Aristotle delineated most explicitly but which is nevertheless implicit in
>any attempt to posit an "objective" time; including that of modern physics.
>
>Time in any event is not a "truth". It is a dimension of experience that is
>acknowledged in all cultures and as such a constitutive element of human
>experience although the way it is reflectively posited varies. Two
>modalities are mpw generally acknowledged as a result of Mircea Eliade's
>discussion of "sacred" and "profane" time which has degenerated into
>"circular" v. "linear" time for many. There's no reason to believe that
>these categories accomodate all the ways that people have of accounting for
>time as something objectively existent. I find it more illuminating to
look
>at the experience of time rather than the secondary models.
>
>Marx's doctoral dissertation discussion of Epicurus' concept of time
>(available on the Marxist Internet Archive) is quite good and succinct.
For
>example:
>
>
>"Time, in contrast, the change of the finite to the extent that change is
>posited as change, is just as much the real form which separates appearance
>from essence, and posits it as appearance, while leading it back into
>essence. Composition expresses merely the materiality of the atoms as well
>as of nature emerging from them. Time, in contrast, is in the world of
>appearance what the concept of the atom is in the world of essence, namely,
>the abstraction, destruction and reduction of all determined being into
>being-for-itself."
>
>Which could be considered a very technical way of describing the essence of
>time as "all things must pass", being-in-itself, that which doesn't
change,
>what has happened doesn't change.
>
> Also:
>
>"Indeed, time being the abstract form of sensation, according to the
atomism
>of Epicurean consciousness the necessity arises for it to be fixed as a
>nature having a separate existence within nature. The changeability of the
>sensuous world, its change as change, this reflection of appearance in
>itself which constitutes the concept of time, has its separate existence in
>conscious sensuousness. Human sensuousness is therefore embodied time, the
>existing reflection of the sensuous world in itself."
>
>This is most interesting for two reasons (1) the idea that sensousness is
>embodied time and (2) the way in which time is attributed an appearance
>which in fact it doesn't possess; time really never appears, time is
>determined to exist as that which continuously negates appearance; all
>things pass, all appearance is change. This posited reflection of time as
>objectively appearing has its parallel in the positing of the ego
>itself--something which even Kant commented on in his discussion of time in
>the Transcendental Aesthetic (Critique of Pure Reason.) I've experienced
>the similarity also in the state of total absorbtion in which could be
>equally described as "having lost/forgotten myself" and "time seemed to
>stop". .
>
>There is a quite interesting collection of studies on the different
cultural
>concepts of time published by UNESCO in 1975 originally as "Les cultures et
>le temp" (contains essays by Paul Ricoeur and Aron Gurevitch) which was
>translated into Spanish (Las Culturas y el Tiempo, Editorial Sigueme 1979)
>but I'm not sure if it was translated into English. I find such studies
>much more enlightening than such publications as the National Geographics
>"The Mystery of Time" which sets up the instrumentalist time system of
>modern physics as "the objective truth" about time.
>
>Paul H. Dillon
>
>