Time and Being : On Those Stepping Into Rivers

Metaphysics & Epistemology
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I might have titled this Being and Time, but I don’t want to limit the discussion to a particular famous book, or to Heidegger.

My hope is that others will completely surprise me and one another with their answer(s) to this question:

How, if at all, is being related to time ?

The question is either suspiciously vague or delightfully open. I hope participants will help others understand what these terms means for them. My own view is that we have to define them together as entangled, if not as two names for the same ongoing event.

I will present my own blurry view later, because I don’t want to prioritize or leave it out altogether.

But let me offer what may serve as inspiration as well as initial topic (if you like it for that).

Plato’s Cratylus contains this famous philosopheme.

Heraclitus, I believe, says that all things pass and nothing stays, and comparing existing things to the flow of a river, he says you could not step twice into the same river.

The SEP gives us this alleged fragment from Heraclitus himself, which I much prefer to what’s found in Plato.

potamoisi toisin autoisin embainousin hetera kai hetera hudata epirrei.

On those stepping into rivers staying the same other and other waters flow.

I don’t want to over-bias responses, but I tend to understand this in terms of the tension between the “being” of the river and the “being” of the “other and other waters” that flow.

I hope those who isolate being from time or consider time as somehow “unreal” or only apparent participate, along with those who might understand being to be merely apparent, and only time real. And so on.

What can you tell me about time and being ?

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I hoped someone else would jump in first, but here goes:

A thing cannot change unless it shows more than one “face.” Its different faces must be synthesized as faces of what is therefore the same being.

In this case we have a temporal synthesis, so we might speak of “moments” rather than “faces.”

A thing cannot change unless it is the temporal synthesis of its moments.

On those stepping into rivers staying the same other and other waters flow.

We have the enduring identity of the river and the difference ( or othering ) of its flowing waters.

I admire the genius of Heraclitus here for choosing such a continuous example. Mathematicians with a philosophical bent have obsessed over how to “capture” this continuity with a discrete symbolism. The waters are “instantaneously” different. The river has an “uncountable” infinity of moments/waters.

Here I have only considered a being that changes. I hope I have made a case for understanding such a being as a temporal synthesis of its moments.

To me this only makes sense as phenomenology. What is this temporal synthesis ? It’s just something we live, which I can only point at. Not explain. Indeed, explanation seems to presuppose objects that change.

How might we approach an object that does not change ?

Does such an object make sense ?

Is the sign “being”, understood as lacking all determination, a candidate for this ?

Does determination bring a being into time ?

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One more step into that river.

How does an object exist as shared ? How can we speak about the same that shows itself to different people at different times ?

Forget that. We do not want to explain it, because explanation presupposes shared objects.

So instead, we settle ( I settle ) for just pointing at this basic structure.

Let’s consider the river again. It’s already a temporal synthesis. It wasn’t explicit before, but I experience the river. I see it, step in it, and so on. So its moments are perceptual, affective, even historically significant more me.

To share this river with others, the temporal synthesis has to also be an inter-personal synthesis. I suggest that this is a “logical” synthesis.

The “river in itself” is not “hidden behind” the river-for-me-then and the-river-for-you-now. It is instead just this logical synthesis, which is “ajar” in the sense that the river is an ongoing phenomenon, that figures in our projected futures.

This version of the river-in-itself is “sufficiently transcendent,” and less confusing and paradoxical than assuming that consciousness hides the river from us. No.

Time and other people hide the river from us.

Because the river is a logical synthesis, a temporal-interpersonal synthesis, it is never fully present. To see one “side” or “moment” of the river is to not-see all the others.

The river can only show itself by mostly hiding.

Because it is the river.

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This is precisely the topic I am trying to work on. But for now it is only a set of insights that I am trying to connect into a unified system.

For now, I can only present it in theses:

  • To give one’s own definition of time means to create one’s own philosophy.

  • Time is what can happen, but does not necessarily have to happen. A completed event is a being/entity.

  • Time, power, and gaze are inseparably connected. The gaze determines the structure of what can happen, thereby changing the configuration of the possible. Time is the possible itself. Power is that which changes this configuration through the gaze.

  • Thinking, in its most general form, is an attempt to predict the future.

  • One should distinguish between the available/present past and the objective past. The question is whether the objective past exists at all, or whether there is only the available past.

  • The past is not fixed; it is a battlefield of power. Thinking, social institutions, and physical processes partially rewrite or hide the past.

At this point I cannot seriously defend any of these theses. This is only working material.

In brief, the relation between being and time looks like this: being and time are indeterminate, and an entity/a being is the moment of formation, the trace of time as an event that has become determinate. The entity is assembled out of the space of the possible, both in the form of matter and in the form of metaphysical terms.

I understand that much of this sounds bold and perhaps insane, but since there is no real dialogue yet, I am simply offering raw notes.

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I assume that an object does not exist in itself in any fundamental sense, but is only the result of relations. I assume that a philosophy of time should proceed from the primacy of action, rather than from the object. The object is already an entity as such, and therefore something that conceals being.

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Being and time are constructs of human intelligence; they don’t relate to each other so much as each relates to that intellectual system, for its comprehension of that which is given to it.

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An unmoving frame of reference is part of the experience of change. There is no change that isn’t with reference to the changeless. The experience of the river swings between these poles.

Kierkegaard said we experience time in two ways:

  1. You are unique in all the world and what you’re experiencing is for the first time, and will never come again. There is drama to this way of experiencing. The world is on a knife’s edge.

  2. You are just another person on another summer day, doing that same thing people have been doing since there were people. Seeing yourself this way comes with melancholy. Nothing is new, it’s all a repetition.

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I’d say being is eternal at the level of fundamental physics (say, spin-networks of qubits from which space emerges with fluctuating energy intensities). At this level time is just a duration between different energy intensities, but with sufficient intensity the energy becomes mass, initiating an explosion (big bang) that goes on for a couple of hundred million years until the radiation cools down and atoms can form and build material compounds and clouds of gas. At this level time is the duration between many different spatial events as chunks of matter swirl around, form galaxies, stars, planets, and organisms who think about the relation between being and time. Allegedly time stops in black holes, but being is arguably eternal. So for me it seems they’re separate.

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Time is the past history for being from the birth of being. “Now” is being’s perception, and being is on the way to future in his present perceptual reality to upcoming unfolding dynamically changing the new now.

There is no being without time. IOW, there is no being without the past and history. Therefore time is the essential feature and foundation of being. Time also indicates all beings are limited by it i.e. all being is temporal in its beingness.

Time is also being’s perceptual reality of its past, which works on being both mentally and physically telling how far being has come from its birth to now, and how far more of interval is left for the being in the world for its beingness. Being’s beingness is totally up to its physical functions within the being which maintains its life.

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Being is to be, and to exist in the world. Being can explain when asked “how is it like to be being” or “What is it like to exist?” from its own experience of being and existing.

Being has thoughts, languages, sense of time and perception on the world. Being is also limited in its existence or being beingness in the world.

Therefore saying “God is Being” is absurd and not making sense, and needs explanation on what it means or implies. First of all, amongst many other issues, God is not visible in the world, and there is no physical body with God.

But claiming “A dog is being” makes more sense. Because dogs exist in the world, they are aware of the world they live in, they have thoughts, emotions and desires. They are also limited in their existence like other beings. The only thing they lack is more reasoning and linguistic abilities.

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In one of your messages, you mentioned Finnegans Wake, and after thinking about it a little, I understand what you were getting at. The point is that objects are both self-identical and not fully self-identical at the same time, and that this is their way of being.

One can agree with this, but only locally. It seems to me that this mode of thought refers more to Hegelian dialectics than to Heidegger. Heidegger does not think from self-negation as the driving force, but rather from disclosure and concealment. A being is the way in which Being reveals itself.

Since Heidegger’s time, physics has advanced considerably. And although quantum physics is not an interpretation of ontology, some analogies seem interesting to me. In particular, two intuitions: first, the result of an interaction is fundamentally undetermined before the interaction itself; second, mass may also be a consequence of interaction.

A well-known example is Einstein’s thought experiment: a weightless object with perfectly reflecting walls, filled with photons, acquires mass because the photons strike the walls and create resistance. So here ontology is no longer, in principle, limited to phenomenology. This is only a physical speculation, but it shows that, at least in a particular case, mass can manifest from pure possibility.

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Let’s start with what Heidegger says and then try to make sense of it. Heidegger begins Being and Time saying his aim is to answer the question of the meaning of being in general. But by the end of the book, he says he still hasn’t quite answered it. He does define Dasein’s kind of being as the ontological difference , the in-between , happening , occurrence , the ‘as’ structure , projection.

“ Something like “being” has been disclosed in the understanding of being that belongs to existing Da-sein as a way in which it understands.”

“The ontological condition of the possibility of the understanding of being is temporality itself.”(Basic Problems, 1927)

“In Being and Time, Being is not something other than time: “Time” is a preliminary name for the truth of Being, and this truth is what prevails as essential in Being and thus is Being itself.”(What is Metaphysics)

But he leaves us with the following questions:

“The existential and ontological constitution of the totality of Da-sein is grounded in temporality. Accordingly, a primordial mode of temporalizing of ecstatic temporality itself must make the ecstatic project of being in general possible. How is this mode of temporalizing of temporality to be interpreted? Is there a way leading from primordial time to the meaning of being? Does time itself reveal itself as the horizon of being?”

In the 1962 work , On Time and Being , he answers this question in the affirmative, with an addtional feature.

“Time, which is addressed as the meaning of Being in Being and Time, is itself not an answer, not a last prop for questioning, but rather itself the naming of a question. The name “time” is a preliminary word for what was later called “the truth of Being.” “ Being and Time is on the way toward finding a concept of time, toward that which belongs most of all to time, in terms of which “Being” gives itself as presencing. This is accomplished on the path of the temporality of Dasein in the interpretation of Being as temporality.”

In the 1962 work, Heidegger ‘grounds’ being in temporality and ‘grounds’ both time and being in ‘appropriation’. Here he defines being as a letting be of presencing (unconcealing) which stands within the realm of temporality, as if being is synonymous with only one of the three ecstacies of time, that of presencing. On the other hand, Heidegger says that the not yet and the having been are also modes of presencing.

So what is time? What is Being? The most important lint is that time is not a neutral templar placed over events. It is the meaningful unfolding of events. There can be no time without beings being disclosed, but there can be no disclosure of beings without a human being (according to Heidegger). Time is this complete structure.

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It might be worth noting that Heidegger uses a technical definition of ‘time’ that is beyond me, but that is quite different to the way that the word ‘time’ is used in common speech. I dug out that Heidegger’s use of the word pertains to what he calls originary temporality — a unified phenomenon where the past, present, and future occur simultaneously as “ecstases.”

So putting Heidegger aside for now, for me the word ‘time’ has connotations of change and of direction (increasing entropy).

When I observe my hands on the keyboard, I want to say that my hands are part of me but the keyboard isn’t. But I also see this from another perspective, which I will try to describe.

If my eyes were replaced by a camera and a snapshot taken of the scene, then I would have a photograph of two hands on a keyboard. The keyboard is as much a part of the photograph as the hands are. So there is a sense in which the keyboard is as much a part of me as the hands are, but I’ve changed the way I’m using the word ‘me.’

It’s this latter use of the word that I will employ when I ask the question: If this ‘me’ were devoid of change, then in what sense could it be said that “I am present in the world”?

I don’t have an answer, but I thought it might be interesting to get my ears bashed by those that do.

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They talk about stepping into the river, and not being able to step into the same river twice. They don’t talk about stepping out of the river, and going back into the river again.

It seems to imply that Being’s life is only once in the real world. Once you step into the world, and there is no way out of the world. The only way out of the world is by not Being anymore, or stopping Beingness in the world.

The river still flows, which signifies the time keeps running in the world. But Being can step into the same river only once in its life time. It cannot step into different water (time) twice. It cannot come out of the river without being nonbeing.

That is the limitation of Being, and one time and one time chance only in the world as Being.

To overcome that, Being must believe in immortality of soul and transition of souls into another world like Socrates had done.

Now these rivers are many, and mighty, and diverse, and there are four principal ones, of which the greatest and outermost is that called Oceanus, which flows round the earth in a circle; and in the opposite direction flows Acheron, which passes under the earth through desert places into the Acherusian lake: this is the lake to the shores of which the souls of the many go when they are dead, and after waiting an appointed time, which is to some a longer and to some a shorter time, they are sent back to be born again as animals. The third river passes out between the two, and near the place of outlet pours into a vast region of fire, and forms a lake larger than the Mediterranean Sea, boiling with water and mud; and proceeding muddy and turbid, and winding about the earth, comes, among other places, to the extremities of the Acherusian Lake, but mingles not with the waters of the lake, and after making many coils about the earth plunges into Tartarus at a deeper level. This is that Pyriphlegethon, as the stream is called, which throws up jets of fire in different parts of the earth. The fourth river goes out on the opposite side, and falls first of all into a wild and savage region, which is all of a dark-blue colour, like lapis lazuli; and this is that river which is called the Stygian river, and falls into and forms the Lake Styx, and after falling into the lake and receiving strange powers in the waters, passes under the earth, winding round in the opposite direction, and comes near the Acherusian lake from the opposite side to Pyriphlegethon. And the water of this river too mingles with no other, but flows round in a circle and falls into Tartarus over against Pyriphlegethon; and the name of the river, as the poets say, is Cocytus.

Such is the nature of the other world; and when the dead arrive at the place to which the genius of each severally guides them, first of all, they have sentence passed upon them, as they have lived well and piously or not. And those who appear to have lived neither well nor ill, go to the river Acheron, and embarking in any vessels which they may find, are carried in them to the lake, and there they dwell and are purified of their evil deeds, and having suffered the penalty of the wrongs which they have done to others, they are absolved, and receive the rewards of their good deeds, each of them according to his deserts. But those who appear to be incurable by reason of the greatness of their crimes—who have committed many and terrible deeds of sacrilege, murders foul and violent, or the like—such are hurled into Tartarus which is their suitable destiny, and they never come out. Those again who have committed crimes, which, although great, are not irremediable—who in a moment of anger, for example, have done violence to a father or a mother, and have repented for the remainder of their lives, or, who have taken the life of another under the like extenuating circumstances—these are plunged into Tartarus, the pains of which they are compelled to undergo for a year, but at the end of the year the wave casts them forth—mere homicides by way of Cocytus, parricides and matricides by Pyriphlegethon—and they are borne to the Acherusian lake, and there they lift up their voices and call upon the victims whom they have slain or wronged, to have pity on them, and to be kind to them, and let them come out into the lake. And if they prevail, then they come forth and cease from their troubles; but if not, they are carried back again into Tartarus and from thence into the rivers unceasingly, until they obtain mercy from those whom they have wronged: for that is the sentence inflicted upon them by their judges. Those too who have been pre-eminent for holiness of life are released from this earthly prison, and go to their pure home which is above, and dwell in the purer earth; and of these, such as have duly purified themselves with philosophy live henceforth altogether without the body, in mansions fairer still which may not be described, and of which the time would fail me to tell.

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The floor changes from boards to tiles. Change does not require time.

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Compare Schopenhauer, How Time Begins with the First Eye that Opens

…the law of causality and the treatment and investigation of nature which is based upon it, lead us necessarily to the conclusion that, in time, each more highly organised state of matter has succeeded a cruder state: so that the lower animals existed before men, fishes before land animals, plants before fishes, and the unorganised before all that is organised; that, consequently, the original mass had to pass through a long series of changes before the first eye could be opened. And yet, the existence of this whole world remains ever dependent upon the first eye that opened, even if it were that of an insect. For such an eye is a necessary condition of the possibility of knowledge, and the whole world exists only in and for knowledge, and without it is not even thinkable. The world is entirely idea, and as such demands the knowing subject as the supporter of its existence. This long course of time itself, filled with innumerable changes, through which matter rose from form to form till at last the first percipient creature appeared,—this whole time itself is only thinkable in the identity of a consciousness whose succession of ideas, whose form of knowing it is, and apart from which, it loses all meaning and is nothing at all.

Thus we see, on the one hand, the existence of the whole world necessarily dependent upon the first conscious being, however undeveloped it may be; on the other hand, this conscious being just as necessarily entirely dependent upon a long chain of causes and effects which have preceded it, and in which it itself appears as a small link. These two contradictory points of view, to each of which we are led with the same necessity, we might again call an antinomy in our faculty of knowledge… The necessary contradiction which at last presents itself to us here, finds its solution in the fact that, to use Kant’s phraseology, time, space, and causality do not belong to the thing-in-itself, but only to its phenomena, of which they are the form; which in my language means this: The objective world, the world as idea, is not the only side of the world, but merely its outward side; and it has an entirely different side—the side of its inmost nature—its kernel—the thing-in-itself… But the world as idea… only appears with the opening of the first eye. Without this medium of knowledge it cannot be, and therefore it was not before it. But without that eye, that is to say, outside of knowledge, there was also no before, no time. Thus time has no beginning, but all beginning is in time.

World as Will and Idea, p 37

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This is astonishingly close to Wheeler’s Participatory Anthropic Principle, and particularly to his self-excited circuit.

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Of course. Hence the whole relationship between quantum physics and philosophical idealism. Michel Bitbol, as you’ve mentioned. He’s right across all of this (ref).

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Beautiful thought beautifully expressed.

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I basically agree with all of this. It’s the tension between (1) and (2) that fascinates me and I think you.
(?)

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