Time’s riddle, from a philosophical point of view... - Tony Fisher

Tree Photo by Tony Fisher, Warbstow, Cranworthy Water, 19th Aug 2020

(T-30) Is time something we count or does counting presuppose time?

Time is not an arrow, shooting forever into the future, without cessation, without a target; but nor is time unconcerned with the problem of futurity... Time presses on... Tick, Tock...

(T-25) Time does not ‘run down’ to zero; yet human existence is permeated by time’s measurement... we say we have time for this, but not for that... that we must dash, or that we can tarry awhile...

There is the time that is appropriate for our deeds and actions.

Heidegger called this ‘clock time’. It is the time that holds us in its grip, that disciplines our day, that regulates what we do, that imposes its norms – we embody clock time without thought (‘now’ time, clock time, the time for doing this or that, for waking up, for sleeping, for working, for leisure activity, for more work) Clock time presses in: oppressive, structured, breathless, frenetic; it is busy time; forgetful time; the time of labour; laborious time.

(T-20) But it is also ‘derivative’, according to Heidegger...

What does it mean to say time is derivative? From what does it derive? Time is not reducible to clock time; clock time is no more than the ordering of another time, the imposition of regularity on a time that is profoundly irregular . . . a more fundamental time...

Niton-undercliff by Tony Fisher, 25th Aug 2018

(T-15) What of this other time that precedes our everyday experience of time? Is it that great flowing river, that majestic passage of empty instants, held forever in the eternity of a continuum outside of time? What if time were neither flow nor arrow nor linearity nor regularity? St. Augustine discovered the riddle of time’s appearance by way of this other concealed time, of time’s ‘other’.

If time ‘is coming out of what does not yet exist, passing through what has no duration, and moving into what no longer exists’, then why am I so familiar with future time, with past time? Must the future and the past not also make their appearance in my present? 

(T-10) Phenomenological time provided an answer: Husserl proclaimed the present to be, not an instant, but a stretch: the stretched time of the long now, a comet’s tail, a present that retains its past, while anticipating its future... pure, subjective time...

Heidegger went further: temporality is our fundamental mode of being. Time ‘opens’ a world for us: we project time, and the time of the world is no more than the flowering of our own temporalisation.

Think about it, said Kant – if time and space were real features of the world, we would be able to see them... touch them...

“Time is not an arrow, shooting forever into the future, without cessation, without a target…”

(T-5) But doesn’t time touch us? Don’t we feel time in aching bones, or witness it in wrinkles etched on faces? don’t we fear time’s effect...? we resist time because we know that time is running out, and that running out belongs somehow to time’s nature...

(T-1) And what of those other times? The circular time of seasons? Or geological time, which carves itself upon our dawning planetary consciousness in the form of deep ecology, deep history: does this not speak of a depth of time that escapes our experience of time?

(T-0) If time is irreducible to a mere countdown, then why are we incapable of resisting the fatal temptation of the zero? 

Time is our ‘amor fati’... the fatal love of time.