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II Contemporary Philosophies of Lived Time At the railroad station he noted that he still had thirty minutes. He quickly recalled that in a cafe on the Calle Brazil . . . there was an enormous cat which allowed itself to be caressed as if it were a disdainful divinity. He entered the cafe. There was the cat, asleep. He ordered a cup of coffee, slowly stirred the sugar, sipped it . . . and thought, as he smoothed the cat’s black coat, that this contact was an illusion and that the two beings, man and cat, were as good as separated by a glass, for man lives in time, in succession, while the magical animal lives in the present, in the eternity of the instant. —J.-L. Borges, “The South” How long is “now”? In the tradition of James and Husserl, philosophers examine subjective time through the phenomenological analysis of the experience of temporality. Whether “continental” or “analytic” in philosophical flavor, these analyses acknowledge from the outset that the awareness of time raises special questions. The “now” of awareness seems to contain an immediate consciousness of temporally extended phenomena like change, motion, duration, sequence, and order. While the instant is “thin,” its accompanying consciousness is temporally thick, seeming to involve events that cannot cohabit a single moment. The philosophical project is to identify what is necessary and fundamental for thick awareness. Three distinct positions are discussed in the chapters in this section: “retentionalist ,” “extensionalist,” and “cinematic.” These labels are not self-explanatory, so in this introduction we will try to distinguish them and provide a coordinated framework for dialogue . With respect to the subjective experience of Now, what is “thick” and what is “thin”? Events in the world are thin. The lightning flash lasts its milliseconds and then ceases to exist. In our experience of a brief, surprising event, we discern the three phases of the Husserlian schema, as anatomized by James Mensch in the previous chapter: first, a startling “something,” “data” intruding like an uninterpreted exclamation, “!?.” But this shock of the new is immediately subject to interpretation: lightning? camera flash? fireworks? hallucination ? Very soon after, a single satisfying answer appears: lightning, which interpretation may soon be further confirmed as the expectation of a thunderclap is fulfilled. The initial shards of experience are constituted as an “intentional object.” Routine experience also comprises the three phases of data, interpretation, and constitution, but normally these 76 Part II intertwine in a continuous flow. The banal coffee cup on the table is emanating routine confirmations of its cup-ness. Aspects of its appearance can be lightly sampled for the sake of our interaction, just to make sure the handle is right for grasping, the contents at a certain level (for estimating weight and trajectory suitable for a sip, etc.). In this case the flow of data is sporadic, even though the object is continuously one and the same. Much of experience is like this. This morning, however, I’ve reached for a book and knocked over the coffee cup. An exasperating stain spreads across an earlier draft of this commentary. The mishap has its uses, for in this episode we can discern many strands of time, which we will do well to distinguish. Picture the episode like this: |, the cup upright; /, the cup tipping toward disaster ; _, the cup down and its contents spilled across the desk. The brief chronicle of the event, including a few moments before and after, might be rendered like this:| | | | | / _ _ _ _ _ Time appears conventionally as clock time, ticking from left to right. Each stroke of the cartoon is like a frame in a film. It has its exact date, a fact which can be measured down to the tiniest increments. We can use the timeline to tag each “frame” of the three scenes depicted: “before,” frames 1 through 5; “during,” frame 6; “after,” frames 7 through 11. Of course, this continuous process could be subdivided into infinite increments, but for heuristic purposes we will assume that the eleven moments of the cartoon are atomic, defining instants that cannot be further divided: [ | ] [ | ] [ | ] [ | ] [ | ] [ / ] [ _ ] [ _ ] [ _ ] [ _ ] [ _ ] Subjectively, at least part of our experience seems to run in parallel with the objective timeline. Assuming that I’m conscious of the cup throughout the episode, I am at least aware of events in some of the frames, in approximately their real order, lagging a short time (one frame, perhaps) behind the events themselves. Of course, like the events themselves , the...

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