Tricks of Time: Bergson, Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur in Search of Time, Self, and Meaning

One - The Aporias of Temporality

23 ONE The Aporias ofTemporality The first word that you ever spoke was: light. Thus time began. For long you said no more. — Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours THE ORDINARY SENSE OF TIME AND SELF Thinkers of all sorts, from scientists to philosophers, have attempted to give a final account of time. Time has been portrayed in a multiplicity of forms, hypostatized in a thousand metaphors, and described through a plethora of symbols. However, when separated from theogonies , genealogies, and mythologies, the human desire to understand time in its totality, on its own account, in all of its modalities from the personal to the cosmic, has found little satisfaction over the centuries. The central problem is that time has yet to be definitively thematized so as to make it clearly intelligible.1 The internally consistent accounts of time found in science, psychology, philosophy, aesthetics, or practical action, when compared, are incompatible; there is no “right” time. Regardless of the account, time transcends its analogical representations; its essential characteristics are never completely captured by any one of them. Another way of stating the intractability of the time problem is that we are unable “to think it away.”2 There is a common notion, however, that behind both the chronometry of daily life and the felt sensation of duration, as well as behind 24 Tricks of Time the biological time of physiological processes and the metrics of astronomy , there subsides a more fundamental or absolute time that is at once primordially continuous and infinite. It is this sense of a great, pervasive , but hidden time that has often persuaded metaphysical thinkers to define time on the basis of permanence over change. This tendency is no more clearly epitomized than in Plato’s seminal and classical statement that “time [is] an eternal moving image of the eternity which remains forever at one.”3 While Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) was later to identify time with movement ,4 our modern understanding of time has its more recent historical basis in Galileo Galilei (1564–1642). Galileo realized that all important features of local motion — the distance covered, the speed, and the change of speed — could be expressed in terms of displacements given the magnitudes of elapsed distance (space) and time.5 It is here that time, understood as an independent variable in the description of motion, finds its conception. Most significantly, time was now conceived as something independent of the environment. Subsequently, this implied that motion was better described in terms of time, not time in terms of motion as the ancients had held. Also implicit in Galileo’s approach was a certain refinement to the sense of uniformity that characterizes the flow of time. Without such refinement, time could not have become the independent variable that it has. Some 80 years after the discoveries of Galileo, Isaac Newton (1642–1727) codified this understanding of time for physics in the famous definition: “Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equally without relation to anything external, and by another name is called duration: relative, apparent, and common time, as some sensible and external measure of duration by the means of motion, which is commonly used instead of true time; such as an hour, a day, a month, a year.”6 Terms such as “absolute,” “true,” “mathematical,” “itself,” and “equally” all work to distinguish time from any particularity whatsoever and give it a metaphysical preeminence of perfect uniformity and unalterable presence. The most common analogy to this understanding of time is a line linking together mathematical points. Ricoeur states, “According to this representation, time is constituted merely by relations of simultaneity and of succession between abstract ‘nows,’ and by the distinction between extreme end points and the intervals between them. These two sets of relationships are sufficient for defining the time when something happens, for deciding what came earlier or later, and how long a certain state of affairs might last.”7 Absent in this description is the need to introduce the distinction between past, present, and future particular to the agency of a human spectator. There is no need to single out a unique moment of time as the present, separating the past from the future. The “now” is always anonymous, a purely quantitative and seemingly independent datum. Until perhaps recently, classical science has never felt it necessary...