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THINKING TIME / HERMENEUTIC SUPPOSITIONS To think of time—of all that retrospection, To think of to-day, and the ages continued henceforward. . . . Is to-day nothing? Is the beginningless past nothing? If the future is nothing they are just as surely nothing. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Un)doing Time in Time Un(doing) In my time, many a time, I have heard myself and others speak of a lifetime. This compound dis/plays the juxtaposition of life and time so elemental to our way of being in the world: what most impresses our thinking about the life-that-ispassing is the passing-that-is-life, a passing that lies at the root of our rootlessness . We are perpetually cast in the mold of temporal beings, always, it seems, being in time for the time being. Time flies, runs, flees, passes too quickly, too slowly, and yet at the end of day—invariably the beginning of night—the question persists: where did the time go? The seemingly trite wording of the query should not be overlooked: the emphasis is on time’s going, that is, one attempts to take hold of the passage of time. From the philosophical position known as temporal realism, and according to the somewhat more sophisticated theory of four-dimensionalism—the hypothesis that material reality consists of spatial and temporal parts, that objects persist in spacetime through the manifold combinations of perdurance, endurance, presentism, and eternalism1—it is the “progress of events, the coming to pass of one thing after another, and not just a timeless tapestry” that grounds the distinction between past, present, and future and thereby accords legitimacy to the proposition that time is real.2 Stated less technically, the signposts that mark one’s entry into and departure from the world are temporal in their comportment, birth at one end, death at the other. Nothing, it would 1 1 seem, is more basic to the scripting of the egological narrative—the I “am” of what “is”3—than the time it takes one to die, an insight familiar to the philosophically attuned from Heidegger’s infamous notion of Sein zum Tode, beingunto -death—the (not)being that is(not), present all too pervasively in its absence.4 Interestingly enough, this philosophic discernment, often considered elitist and removed from mundane social reality, is supported by archaeological and ethnological evidence from the dawn of human culture indicating that Paleolithic humans were acutely aware of the temporal nature of existence. Anthropologists have even argued that the ability to view time in its twofold dimension , the present as an outcome of the past and as a platform for the future, is one of the principal ways in which Homo sapiens is distinguished as a distinct species of primate.5 Even in preliterate societies the preoccupation with temporality —specifically, the quest to commemorate time and thereby overcome the ravaging aspect of mortality—was concretized in rituals that celebrated birth and death as the bookends of life’s journey. Although these rites might seem “primitive” to the critical eye, ideationally they were no less sophisticated than the most convoluted postmodern discourse that depicts human temporality as caught between recollection of the beginning anticipating the end and anticipation of the beginning recollecting the end. Robert Lauer, a sociologist by training, astutely observed: Indeed, if one were to write a history of concern with the temporal, one would find oneself compelled to probe into the primordial consciousness. Even at the most primitive level of human life, we have evidence of human awareness of and concern with temporality. . . . In the mythical consciousness of the archaic human, there was an inner sense, an intuitive grasping, of the temporality of life. . . . Human awareness of and concern with temporality is particularly evident in our unique concern for the dead—a distinctively human trait that has apparently characterized all people in all places and in all times.6 Besides maintaining a concern with temporality from time immemorial, humans have also been compelled to inquire about the nature of time. What sense of time is conveyed when one speaks of a lifetime? No sooner spoken that another question suggests itself: How does one distinguish the time of telling from the telling of time? To discourse about time is to be caught in a circle: one cannot speak of the being of time except from the standpoint of the time of being, nor of the time of being except from the standpoint of the being of time...

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