Time and Being : On Those Stepping Into Rivers

Metaphysics & Epistemology
141

Funny you mention that, given my long post about vision as blindness above.

The bolded part is a beautiful expression of being as time. I also think of all is vanity. “Vanity” translates hebel/hevel, which is very rich word in Hebrew that includes foggy references to breath and vapor and futility and foolishness. Our foolish futile chasing of this fog ever deeper into that same fog whose name we hope to find in that fog. Declaring that all is vanity is declaring the mystery and yet also a peace before this mystery, and of course a world-weary sense of the impossibility of beating the game.

This is sort of what I mean by “being is ontology.” We answer the question with the question. Being is its attempt to discover its true name. Being is a question(ing). Being is inquiry itself, turned back on its own turning. Is it agony or ecstasy ? Bothingly it proceeds. We might say that we lose our faith in the finality of a decision, and yet enjoy this loss of faith as a vision, a decision after all.

I hope this isn’t too obnoxiously poetic and playful. More soberly, I think philosophy does make genuine progress. But we chase a limit point that is not in the sequence.

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142

Yes… more of a recognition than a resignation.

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143

But what if, like Aristotle, we recognize essence to be immanent, begotten in and by the coming and going; essence is what comes and goes.

Added:
Essence itself may be hypostasizing, but this is a notion of the essence of “Essence” itself (the concept of Essence in general). But we only find a particular essence (essence of oak tree, planet, etc) as it comes to be. Basically, because things are moving, the essence of those things instantiated, has to incorporate their motions.

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“The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there’s no ground.” ~ Chögyam Trungpa

Getting back to the nature of time - this is from an earlier post on the topic:

One seemingly obvious argument against idealism is that we know that the physical world existed long before any conscious beings evolved — so we can be sure that the physical world can exist without any mind to behold it.

Put another way, how could the mind (or the observer, or consciousness ) be fundamental, when rational sentient beings such as ourselves (and ours are the only minds we know of) are such late arrivals in the long pre-history of the universe?

This objection is often deployed as a kind of trump card against any argument for the primacy of consciousness.

But this objection baldly states that there was a time before any observers existed, and that this fact alone is sufficient to show that mind cannot be fundamental. But what is taken for granted in this conjecture, without any real argument, is that temporal succession itself — “earlier”, “later”, “before”, “after”, and “duration” — is real independently of perspective.

This is the assumption that deserves closer scrutiny.

To say that something happened long before the appearance of conscious beings is not merely to describe a physical ordering of events. It is to place those events within a temporal framework that already has determinate structure: a past receding from a present, a sequence unfolding in one direction rather than another, a sense of duration across change. These concepts are dependent on the intuitive sense of temporal order and sequence which mind brings to the picture.

Physics can describe relations between states using a time parameter, but that parameter by itself does not amount to temporal succession. A mathematical ordering does not yet give us a meaningful before and after. The fact that most fundamental physical equations are time-symmetric illustrates the point: the time parameter in physics functions is an index of relations between states, not an account of temporal succession or passage. Direction, duration, and the sense of “before” and “after” enter only at the level of interpretation, description, and experience. Hence the philosophical problem of “time’s arrow”, which is understood to be absent from the equations of physics.

There is a rhetorical question I’m often tempted to ask at this point, even though it sounds strange when first stated: does time exist “from the point of view” of an inanimate object? Of course, inanimate objects do not have points of view — but that is precisely the issue! To ask what time is for a rock, a molecule, or a primordial plasma state is already to drain the question of sense. Nothing is earlier or later for a stone; nothing endures, passes, or recedes for a hydrogen atom. To remove all perspective is not to reveal a purer form of time, the essence of time, but to remove the conditions under which temporal notions are meaningful in the first place.

This does not mean that physical processes cease, nor that equations no longer apply. It means only that without a standpoint from which change can be apprehended as succession, there is no meaningful “before,” no “long ago,” no passage. Time, as time rather than mere formal ordering, is inseparable from the possibility of a point of view.

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145

Aristotle’s objection to Plato’s forms was the claim that they were real independently of any actual existence. This gave rise to the idea of a ‘Platonic realm’ in which ‘forms’ were like free-standing entities. But it’s a very deep issue in metaphysics and to really understand it takes a lot of reading (which I haven’t yet done.)

But even with Aristotelian dualism (hylomorphism) a sharp distinction is made between form and matter (morphe and hyle). The forms are still ideal objects, but they’re only ever encountered when they’re instantiated in particulars. So it’s not right to say that the essence ‘comes and goes’ - the classical view was ‘essence before existence’ (which was what was famously inverted by Sartre. But this is an offshoot to the original post - it’s a question of classical metaphysics.)

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This deserves engagement but it’s late here and my brain hurts. I’ll be back.

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147

If your question implies that time is not a container that beings move through but the directed irreversibility of the act by which anything holds its character through exclusion, then I would answer: being and time are not two distinct entities in relation, since temporal structure is internal to individuation. For anything to be individuated, it must separate from what it is not, a separation that is already spatial, occupying a place through differentiation. Yet separation is itself irreversible; to separate is to defer, to move toward another, thereby implying a later. The spatial act inherently contains time, while the temporal act presupposes something already differentiated as its point of departure, thus containing space within itself. What we have is a single spatio-temporal movement of individuation, which looks like time from the direction of succession and like space from the direction of co-presence.

The Heraclitean river is not an entity that persists despite its flow, but the ongoing exclusion that constitutes a channel, held in place by what it is not, which is already temporal through and through. To ask how being relates to time is to ask the question from a position outside individuation itself, and that position is not available.

From where I stand I can’t know whether the structural core is all there is, or whether being inside this temporal order is also something it is like, and whether that phenomenal texture follows from the structure or exceeds it. “What it is like to be the one asking” cannot be held still, which is what Heraclitus knew.

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148

@Andy

I think your post is great in general, but I’m reluctant to endorse this negation. Now maybe you are basically suggesting that we interpret this being in terms of what it is not, a Hegelian (?) gesture that I can appreciate. No finite thing has genuine being. Everything is what it isn’t, and everything isn’t what it is.

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I like this emphasis on spatiality. Reminds me of Derrida’s “spacing.” Also of the spatial resonance of Plato’s chora.

This is one reason perhaps that I myself vacillate between “aspect” and “moment” as metaphors for the spacetime chunks that are synthesized by the enduring object as the enduring-drifting exclusion of what it is not.

150

This suggests something like Heidegger’s aphorism. Dasein isn’t in time but time itself, searching for a name it cannot have.

151

Yes indeed, which is why, as I read them and agree, existence “is” a primordial time that is “local” rather than “global.” We construct global time — anyone’s and hence no-one’s time — through the construction of clocks by which we regulate our social life.

This public time, which is the lived significance of perceptual object, of a spinning hand, becomes “more real” — for a certain kind of theorist — than its own perspectival perceptual presence in local primordial time. The clock within the world “signifies” the “unreality” of this very lifeworld in which I find the clock. The clock tells me “god’s” time, the time of atoms and void — because the scientific image is constructed in terms of this clock, with magnificent technological effect in the world of that clock.

Yet our metaphysical-spiritual lust looks not at the technology in the lifeworld as the essence of science, but rather at the tacit theology of purely present spectacle suggested by the mathematics.

FWIW, your point is what my thread on “the past” was about. This notion of a “global” past presupposes the symmetry of past and future, which spits in the face of experience.

152

I’ll add a few powerful quotes from Derrida that extend Heidegger’s insight, especially on the issue of signs.

When I say “I,” even in solitary speech, can I give my statement meaning without implying, there as always, the possible absence of the object of speech—in this case, myself? When I tell myself “I am,” this expression, like any other according to Husserl, has the status of speech only if it is intelligible in the absence of its object, in the absence of intuitive presence—here, in the absence of myself. Moreover, it is in this way that the ergo sum is introduced into the philosophical tradition and that a discourse about the transcendental ego is possible. Whether or not I have a present intuition of myself, “I” expresses something; whether or not I am alive, I am “means something.”

The statement “I am alive” is accompanied by my being dead, and its possibility requires the possibility that I be dead; and conversely. This is not an extraordinary tale by Poe but the ordinary story of language. Earlier we reached the “I am mortal” from the “I am”; here we understand the “I am” out of the “I am dead.” The anonymity of the written I, the impropriety of the I am writing, is, contrary to what Husserl says, the “normal situation.” The autonomy of meaning with regard to intuitive cognition, what Husserl established and we earlier called the freedom or “candor” [francparler] of language, has its norm in writing and in the relationship with death.

The originality of meaning as an aim is limited by the telos of vision. To be radical, the difference that separates intention from intuition would nonetheless have to be pro-visional. And yet this provision would constitute the essence of meaning. The eidos is determined in depth by the telos. The “symbol” always points to [fait signe vers] “truth”; it is itself constituted as a lack of “truth.”

That Husserl always thought of infinity as an Idea in the Kantian sense, as the indefiniteness of an “ad infinitum,” leads one to believe that he never derived difference from the fullness of a parousia, from the full presence of a positive infinite, that he never believed in the accomplishment of an “absolute knowledge,” as the self-adjacent presence of an infinite concept in Logos. What he shows us of the movement of temporalization leaves no room for doubt on this subject: although he had not made a theme of “articulation,” of the “diacritical” work of difference in the constitution of sense and signs, he at bottom recognized its necessity. And yet, the whole phenomenological discourse is, we have sufficiently seen, caught up within the schema of a metaphysics of presence which relentlessly exhausts itself in trying to make difference derivative.

In this sense, within the metaphysics of presence, within philosophy as knowledge of the presence of the object, as the being-before-oneself of knowledge in consciousness, we believe, quite simply and literally, in absolute knowledge as the closure if not the end of history. And we believe that such a closure has taken place. The history of being as presence, as self-presence in absolute knowledge, as consciousness of self in the infinity of parousia—this history is closed. The history of presence is closed, for “history” has never meant anything but the presentation (Gegenwartigung) of Being, the production and recollection of beings in presence, as knowledge and mastery. Since absolute self-presence in consciousness is the infinite vocation of full presence, the achievement of absolute knowledge is the end of the infinite, which could only be the unity of the concept, logos, and consciousness in a voice without difference. The history of metaphysics therefore can be expressed as the unfolding of the structure or schema of an absolute will-to-hear-oneself-speak. This history is closed when this infinite absolute appears to itself as its own death. A voice without difference a voice without writing, is at once absolutely alive and absolutely dead.

New names indeed will have to be used if we are to conceive as “normal” and preprimordial what Husserl believed he could isolate as a particular and accidental experience, something dependent and secondary—that is, the indefinite drift of signs, as errance and change of scene (Verwandlung), linking re-presentations (Vergegeniudrtigungen) one to another without beginning or end. There never was any “perception”; and “presentation” is a representation of the representation that yearns for itself therein as for its own birth or its death.

153

What I had in mind is narrower than Hegel’s dialectic: not that everything is what it isn’t, but that anything determinate holds its determinateness through what it is not, and that holding is not a static structure but an irreversible process.

Your own formulation already has this, for when you say “the river can only show itself by mostly hiding, because it is the river,” that “because” is doing exactly the work I mean, since the hiding isn’t obstruction from outside, but is what constitutes the channel as this channel, such that the mostly hidden is not behind the river but is what the river holds itself against.

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154

Could you elaborate on irreversible ? I am tempted to read this as the “ever new waters.” Every “showing” is unique, never to be repeated.

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I think we are indeed saying the “same thing.” I would like to better feel my way into what you mean by what the river holds itself against.

156

I think I hear you. Perhaps you understand “essence” as what “unifies” this motion as motion of ?

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Very early Heidegger (his lectures on intuition and expression) where we see his grasp of the historicity of signs, their changing “radiance.” We also see his concern for “pre-delineations” or “thrown (prejudicial ) comportment” to the object, which has to be made manifest in order to reactivate the original intention. He dismisses ( bad ) positivism in passing. I don’t think he’d enjoy me casting him as a proper positivist, but I am situated here in English in a world where Heidegger’s own strange phrases have “faded.” To say the old thing we cannot say the same thing. The same never returns, but the same-enough-for-now is worth a try.

The phenomenological destruction is, by way of contrast, not only a merely secondary and convenient, more easily manageable methodological means for more limited purposes, but is one of the fundamental elements of the phenomenological posture, that is, it belongs to it as such and is to be co-enacted in every phenomenological basic posture, in its ‘approach’. Why this is the case shall now be merely intimated. The most proximate reason lies in the fact that philosophy does not consist in deduced general definitions, but is always an element of factical life experience. This surely does not mean: Philosophy is not supposed to make constructions and chase after phantasms but should stick to empirical experience, should be ‘inductive’, should be ‘positive’. It means something quite fundamental and does not at all concern the manners and ways of grounding philosophical propositions neither does it concern the restriction of the object domain of philosophy to ‘experience’ in the sense of empirical experience. What is positively meant becomes accessible only in a thorough consideration of the sense-complex of factical life experience.
…
It should only by way of indication be pointed to here through a characteristic of factical life experience. This is the particular characteristic that I designate as the fading of meaningfulness. It is not a disappearing but a fading, i.e. a transition into the stage and into the mode of non-primordiality where the genuineness of the enactment and beforehand the renewal of the enactment are lacking, where even the relations wear themselves out and where merely the content that itself is no longer primordially had ‘is of interest’.Fading has nothing to do with ‘losing something from memory’, ‘forgetting’ or with ‘no longer finding any interest in’. The content of factical life experience falls away from the existence relation towards other contents; that which falls away remains available’, the availability itself can, however, for its part fade as a sense- character of the relation and pass into that of mere usability. (‘Fading’, ‘transition’ and so forth are existentiell concepts.)
…
This concerns - as it concerns every content, relation and enactment of factical life experience - also the sciences and philosophy, both according to their ‘position’ in factical life experience, albeit in different respects and different ways. Scientific and philosophical concepts, propositions and ways of consideration permeate factical life experience more or less comprehensively, however, they do not compose it; in fact they permeate it in the character of the faded, i.e. they have fallen away from the primordial existence relation. Provided that the phenomenological-critical destruction now explicitly directs itself towards factically pre-given philosophies, the latter are subject to the questioning towards the primordiality of the existence relation, further to the question about the extent of the philosophically pure elaboration of the basic concepts and phenomena that are co-given in their approach, their guiding position and their idea and equally to the question about the right pursuit of the pre-delineations which can be brought into relief.

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More of that “icy hot” conceptuality from the early stuff:

Phenomenological destruction - as a fundamental part of phenomenological philosophizing - is therefore not without direction; it does not fortuitously take up meanings of words in order to explain them by means of other taken up meanings. It is not mere shattering but a ‘directed’ deconstruction [Abbau]. It leads into the situation of the pursuit of the pre-delineations, of the enactment of the preconception and thereby of the fundamental experience. From that it is evident that all phenomenological-critical destruction is bound to preconception - and therefore not ultimately primordial and ultimately decisive, but presupposes philosophical fundamental experiences.

Before I try to paraphrase, I invite others to go first.

One more:

[T]he division between strict scientific philosophy and worldview philosophy or - as Jaspers says in his Psychology of Worldviews - between merely scientifically observing philosophy and prophetic philosophy is itself not fully clarified and not radical, simply because of the fact that it is not asked whether the two phenomena ‘science’ and ‘worldview’ may at all be primarily linked to the idea of philosophy. It will thus turn out: The division is not to be rejected because it can actually be bridged, but because it may not be made at all and is, at its root, un-genuine; in other words, because it is ‘enacted’ in a dimension that, contrary to the primordial, the dimension in which philosophy explicates itself, is secondarily set apart and reified.
…
Both elements of the division conceal the access to the idea of phenomenological philosophy as long as one takes these as a fixed and not really problematic starting point for the question about the essence of philosophy. The formula of opposition scientific philosophy - worldview philosophy is the exponent of the structure of the philosophical problematic as it has dominated philosophy since Plato, although with certain interruptions.
…
If the formula itself is to disappear as a non-primordial starting point for the problem, then the structure ultimately motivating it must first be brought into relief and then be destructed. The consideration restricts itself to the contemporary philosophical situation in which all decisive moments of the structure, as it were, are gathered together. This restriction is, in the context of the present task, permissible insofar as the aim is merely to first of all understand the problem. The radical explication of the phenomenological problematic whose sense is to be attained will know how to handle Greek philosophy (Plato and Aristotle) and equally modern philosophy since Descartes in the destructive aspect, such that only therewith the positively decisive destruction of Christian philosophy and theology clearly prepares itself.

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By irreversible I mean that the exclusion cannot be undone without dissolving the thing, which is why the river holds by flowing, not despite it, where the holding and the flowing are one act.

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160

Beautiful. Thank you ! Yes indeed, we are on the same page. Time is showing-hiding. Manifestation is concealment. Each aspect occludes all others. The being hides behind itself.

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