The Poetics of Time: Figures of Finitude, Figures of Infinitude

I. Introduction : From Human Finitude vis-à-vis Time to the Infinitude of Historical - Temporal Figurations

What is time, then? If no-one asks me, I know; but if I am asked and try to explain, then I do not know.

—Augustine, fourth century

The conception of time changes depending on whether it is considered as a power in itself or as a divinity. In a state of ignorance, time is the first thing to manifest itself; in a state of wisdom, it disappears.

—Bhartrihari, fifth century

Since time leaves traces of its passing, human beings do not doubt that it is there. But if they do not doubt, neither do they understand. … Doubt itself is but a part of time.

—Dōgen, thirteenth century

This impossibility of a pure phenomenology of time is what will have to be demonstrated. … The endless aporias of the phenomenology of time, then, may just be the price that has to be paid for any attempt to make time itself appear.

—P. Ricoeur, twentieth century

So imbued and animated by time is our language that in all likelihood there is not one sentence in these pages that does not somehow call for or invoke it.

—J. L. Borges, twentieth century

Historically, no enigma has more sharply brought out the finitude of human knowledge—and the finitude of human beings—than time. Such an awareness of limitation can be traced at least as far as Augustine's well-known exclamation in late antiquity, and then, via the solution of modern critical thought, which makes time a condition of any appearance that could not appear as such, right down to the renewal of the aporia in contemporary phenomenology, where the intuition of time is delimited as inescapable and impossible at once. The maximum of familiarity and the maximum of strangeness, then: just as we are convinced that time is an unavoidable existential dimension for human beings and everything that exists, to the point that language is wholly imbued with expressions of it, we recognize that this dimension cannot ultimately be grasped. For one thing, this is because the inquiry shatters the apparent unity named by the word "time" into spheres of different experience, such as the cosmic time of the world and the inner time of consciousness, to which must be added lived time and historical time. More radically, though, it is because temporality presents itself as an ungraspable phenomenality, with a degree of resistance to immediate perception that is not found in the other irreducible existential dimensions of human dwelling.

If this constitutive limitation vis-à-vis time compels to a certain mourning, it also creates a compensatory reaction; if it has meant giving up on common-sense expectations of a direct perception of time, it has triggered a movement of the imagination that has produced creative representations of it, many of which have actually become established as versions shared by the community. Thus, long before any reflection as to the relative precedence of the subject or the form of synthesis on the object (or the belief that the real is an unattainable noumenon of which only historically conditioned representations can be offered), the realization that time cannot be directly apprehended creates an awareness that it is possible and necessary to forge creative versions of it, on the understanding that they will never resolve the temporal aporia, that however often the answers are renewed in the face of the limit, the limit will remain intact. This is confirmed by the myriad representations of time that have been devised throughout history in accordance with characteristic systems of signs and heuristic models, in areas ranging from mythology and common sense in language, through poetry and the arts, to philosophy and the sciences, allowing different cultures to engage with the opacity of time in a variety of ways and on a variety of levels, constituting a manifold and divergent catalog that is often chaotic and contradictory and certainly Babelic.

Time as Represented by Finite and Infinite Functions: Extension and Division, Potentiality...