Aims: A Brief Metaphysics for Today

Chapter 7. The Subject-Structure of Immediate Experience: Time

Chapter 7 The Subject-Structure of Immediate Experience: Time 7.1 SELF-IDENTITY OVER TIME I maintained earlier (section 4.3) that the very notion of experiencing requires the self-identity over time of a single experiencer. No human experience is instantaneous , and I am aware, within my every act of experiencing, that I am the same experiencing-me throughout the experience . Though I think this is arguably true for any human experience whatever, it is perhaps more evident in the experience of the derivation of the present from the immediate past. Here I am aware of a developing-me even as I retain my selfidentity . A stroboscopic succession of distinct “me’s” simply does not seem to fit my experience.1 Let us examine the experience of derivation more closely. 41 Felt-07 7/27/07 2:52 PM Page 41 7.2 THE CONTINUITY PROPER TO SUBJECT-TIME Once again it proves enlightening to do this in terms of the kind of continuity involved in the experiencing. What are the central characteristics of the continuity inherent in immediate experiencing? I suggest two of the most ordinary forms of experiencing as concrete examples for analysis. The first is the enjoyment of music, or even more simply, of hearing a melody. This is an activity that spans some measure of clock time. The dictionary defines a melody as “pleasing sounds in sequence,” but that does not do it justice. This sequence of pleasing sounds or notes forms a unity or it would not be a melody. The notes of the sequence do not stand alone, as isolated one from another , but precisely as forming a unified whole. There is a togetherness of the notes or else there is no melody. Yet the notes can be played only one at a time. In the instrument or the concert hall—physically, in other words—the notes are isolated. All the former notes have already ceased to be produced by the time each succeeding note is played. Yet the human experience of a melody is of the notes as forming a unity, so that the previous notes have not in fact simply disappeared but are in some way included in the ongoing present experiencing. Indeed they even furnish a certain anticipation of the notes immediately to come. But where are these past notes that yet exist despite their being physically gone? They are contained within the very act of experiencing, the act of hearing the melody. In one sense the past is simply gone. Yet, as St. Augustine speculated: “Perhaps it would be exact to say: there are three times, a present of things past, a present of things present, a present of things to come. In the soul there are these three aspects of time, and I do not see them anywhere else.”2 The present of the past resides “in the mind,” in our very experiencing itself.3 I return, then, to the continuity involved in the experience of hearing a melody. There is indeed a continuity, for we — A I M S 42 42 Felt-07 7/27/07 2:52 PM Page 42 experience the melody as forming a kind of whole. The difference between the individual notes is experienced as qualitative rather than quantitative. And finally, we find, paradoxically, that the present includes the past (and, in some way, also the future by anticipation) rather than excludes it. We have, then, in this simple act of experiencing a continuity of inclusive, qualitative heterogeneity, in exact contrast to the continuity of exclusive , quantitative homogeneity that we recognized in space and in object-time. The continuity of immediate experience is nothing like that of space or of the time measured by clocks. The second concrete example exactly parallels the first: the ordinary experience of understanding spoken language. The words, or even the syllables, must be uttered individually, and in such a way that the previous words have physically ceased to exist by the time each following word is spoken. Yet if the previous words were not somehow still present, no meaning could be conveyed. Where, then, do the words of the sentence enjoy a unity if not in the very act of conscious experience? Once again this is a kind of continuous unity such that the present includes rather than excludes the past. These two concrete examples exemplify the character of experiencing generally. Experiencing is an ongoing, qualitative...