Time-Consciousness

If you have ever flittered your eyes hither or thither and noticed a change, you have experienced the passage of time. Perhaps you did so in a waiting room while your siblings were undergoing a checkup. Perhaps instead you did so at a dull moment in the theater, looking to the edge of the screen at blurry details rather than at the center of the subject in focus. Whatever the case, you here experienced a consciousness of time.

Historically, the consciousness of time has been fickle. Plato famously declared it null—for him, it was an epiphenomenon of the world of change and sensation, forever inferior to the inferior and timeless world of divine forms.

By the middle ages, this view was picked up in the adage of the Book of the Twenty-Four Philosophers, namely, that God is “an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” Of course, this view had already been synthesized with Aristotle who, in the Physics, had declared that time was naught but an epiphenomenon of change. Change, of course, required motion. Come the Metaphysics, then, and “being” in time could be described as but being in motion. God, being perfect and self-sustaining, of course had a perfect motion—circular motion, because always proceeding from and returning to himself. Time, then, had a phenomenal shape, or gestalten: either linear or circular.

NB: This last image is adapted from Proclus’s synthesis of Plato and Aristotle.

These views persisted into the dogmatic metaphysics of Descartes and Leibniz, for both of whom time was yet predicate of motion and, thereby, extended space. Before the revolution in modern mechanics, though, the late antique Saint Augustine turned this view turned this inward. Studying the clocks around him, Augustine suggested that time was a mere posit, created by God, to which our thoughts were given. By the 1800s, the dogmatically-tired Immanuel Kant would run with this view in his “Copernican turn” to the subject. Suggesting that space and time were perceptual conditions for human understanding, Kant further added that space was to outer perception and time was to inner perception, what he called an “intuition of inner time”:

This time, Kant’s student Edmund Husserl would say, involved intention. Inner time-consciousness was thereby decomposable into discrete intentional events as well as into a continuum of “nows,” each saturated with a projection into the future and a retention of the past. This continuum, much like the psychologist William James’ stream of consciousness and Henri Bergson’s duree, inner time-consciousness had precious little to do with space. To the contrary, for all three authors, the time-consciousness was much like a melody: a sequence of intentional events whose experience, while having a material and spatial condition in wavelength frequency, was not conceived or felt with universal reference to that condition:

Of course, there is much more to time-consciousness than just the above experience of time passing. We still wonder whether time is real or just a product of human fancy. We wonder too where it came about, real or otherwise. Indeed, we imagine things in time—what were times like then? what will the times be like in the future? What are the past and the future, and do we all agree on them? There are no simple answers to these questions, but each roughly follows from with time consciousness as such. Time consciousness, the ancients had long ago discovered, involved figuration. The consciousness of time involved attention to change in space and the overall shape of that change. Kant would later this the “synthesis speciosa,” or figurative synthesis, through which change was schematically organized into a figure, or Gestalt.

What we can say with relative certainty about time consciousness, following Kant and his students, is something like the following.

First, the experience of time emerges from an experience of one’s body. This doctrine, first formalized by Henri Bergson, is yet quite ancient. Indeed, Aristotle and Plato had already agreed that time was a function of bodies in motion and change. Following Kant’s turn to the subject, one could return to this view from the standpoint of the subject. Time is thus experienced as the body’s own internal sensibility for outer objects. Though inchoate in Kant, in Bergson it becomes explicit. It is most obvious in our daily organization of time between wakefulness and sleep, the circadian rhythm:

Second, the experience of time follows from a series of affective impressions from one’s environment. The body, Bergson and his student Gilles Deleuze discovered, is a storehouse of impressions. As post-credentialed psychiatrists like to say, “the body keeps the score.” Meaning, as the historian Michel Foucault put it, the body is the “Inscribed surface of events“—one’s body is the sign of all environments through which it has lived, the living proof of that life. The environment quite literally presses on us—read any of the works of H. P. Lovecraft or T. S. Eliot for an example. Note how the space and its objects falls into these authors, becoming associated with feelings of dizziness, estrangement, focus, and so on. These impulses are stored as bodily dispositions, encoded neuronally, etc. We know, for instance, that both PTSD and depression are associated with certain kinds of temporal experience—trauma in the first case and, often though not always, inflammation in the second. Mental illness, as we know, often induces altered experiences of time. Causally, these altered states derive from impressions on the body, however minute. Certainly, genetic predispositions are a factor; yet here again, one cannot be predisposed but in the body. (This is not to take a stand on the physicalist debate in the philosophy of mind!) How we feel time is a function of the living body, which itself is always impressed by its environs. Consider, in this respect, the rings of a tree, each of which illustrate the slow accumulation of time in the trunk of the whole body. Even damage and inflammation are inscribed:

Third, every organism (and perhaps object) experiences its own time (just as it experiences its own space, or field of view). Evolutionarily, every body is impressed by its own environmental (or ecological) niche. It will thus experience its own traumas, inflammations, and affections. Each organism will, therefore, experience its own time. The (now-somewhat-cancelled) German academic Jakob von Uexküll called this own-time (and own-space) of an organism its “umwelt,” its “own world” (in space and time) to which it was adapted. Between every organism and another, therefore, there is an experiential gap, since the own-space and own-time of that organism is not our own. Other organisms we can only experience in data; only we live in our own time. If Dipesh Chakrabarty is right, this also applies to rocks.

Across animals, the above feedback system in a niche has dire visual consequences:

Fourth, time consciousness falls into historical consciousness at the limits of the body’s own time:

The existential philosophers Kierkegaard and Heidegger bound the subject as each of us does—by birth and death. “Birth” Kierkegaard calls something of a paradox—How could there be a time when I was not, especially if my thinking always follows from me? (Kierkegaard was a fly-by-night-Kantian). “Birth” Heidegger called our “thrownness,” which The Doors summarized aptly in this 1970s: “Riders on the storm / into this house we’re born / into this world we’re thrown / like a dog without a bone / an actor out on a loan.”

Indeed, we are thrown into this world, cowering as in some depictions of Adam and Eve:

Born aloof, Adam acquires language and love. Love’s ignorance makes a deal with the devil, and paradise is lost. The knowledge of good and evil bestowed upon Eve, we will recall, is the knowledge of death. Out of the Preternatural Garden of Earthly Delights Man and Woman are thus thrown, for having become awakened to death.

If Heidegger were narrating this story, he would say that Adam and Eve had (despite being “fallen”) accrued “resoluteness,” since they, following the expulsion of Eden, had now to live toward-death. What was once the infinite pasture of Eden had no become a finite life. It is in this finitude that Adam and Eve initiate culture: clothing themselves, building, tilling the soil, and having children:

Or, again, it is in the recognition of the end of the body’s own time-consciousness that cultural life begins. The births of Cain, Abel, and Seth are of course remembered, as was the Adamic expulsion. Culture, then, has a memory:

When that memory is written down or orally recited, we call it history. Again, then, resolute being-toward-death is the culmination of our time-consciousness, because it marks the end of any possible time-consciousness. Finally, then, resolute being-toward-death leads Mankind into history:

(The psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Donald Winnicott have roughly charted the same path of the baby from an “oceanic sentiment,” an Eden in which all things are whole, to the dialectical holding space of the mother, in which wholeness is felt of the child by the mother, to the playground of early childhood, the shores of the sea of life, within which we may discover our body’s limits and enter into culture.)

The difficulty with the isolation of such questions, as well as the isolation of time consciousness, is its passage over into complex historical consciousness. Indeed, the Adamic mythology (itself having analogues in Hesiod and Ovid) is ideal-typical. Time-consciousness, on this (historical) story, is an aboriginal experience to which we return as we withdraw from cultural-historical paraphernalia. Plato famously called this the “turning of the soul” toward the Good, through which we learn to die:

There are notes of a Manichean “basic” fault here: were it not for death, we could experience time-consciousness as Pure Insight and illumination of the present. Perhaps, learning to die, we could therapeutically inoculate ourselves against fear death. It is no coincidence that Mani (from whom “Manichaean” is derived) thought his doctrines compatible the Buddhist vipassana (or a direct enlightenment of the present through meditation on the in and out breath of the body)! On this story, like that of most Gnostics, the Pure Light of Eternality (which, if Aristotle is right, is precisely what God is) is (or is perhaps an imago Dei of) the pure light in us all, an eternal verity that the temporal motions of the body sully and degrade:

On this account of history, with Marx, “tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” If we could only wake up to our own infinite light, pure time freed from death, we could be saved. In the jetztzeit of this realization, revolution might already be in our midst!

This is a most thorny problem, since it begs all of metaphysics and physics in a fell swoop! Be it as it may, we are equally entitled to a non-gnostic view. On this account, time-consciousness passes over into historical consciousness synthetically, as what the philosopher of technology Gilbert Simondon might call a “phase-shift,” what Hegel had earlier called a “sublation,” and what the sociologists Niklas Luhmann and Talcott Parsons might call “system integration.” Following Luhmann, time-consciousness is part of our psychic system, mind. This system is integrated with the somatic system and its subsystems, as was said in our second point above. Beyond the psychic system is, however, a plurality of communications systems—we tend to call these, in aggregate, “society”:

Indeed, the realization of birth and death in the psychic system is an attitude toward the environment surrounding the body. As such, if we admit the interaction of body and mind per the same second point above, then no Manichean-Cartesian dualism between mind and body is admissible, nor is any mystical-gnostic separation of time from history. Indeed, time-consciousness is always-already an historical consciousness, since the body is born in and dies of history.

This is Augustine’s whole meaning when he says that our hearts are restless until they rest in God—thrown into in the storm, the sound and fury of history, we riders on the crests of time have rest only in the Eternality of God. With less of Augustine’s own Manichean dispositions, we may say with sociologist Maurice Halbwachs—”the greatest number of memories come back to us when our parents, our friends, or other persons recall them to us.” We lived in time with these persons, and those lives are our shared history with them, what Martin Heidegger calls our shared “mitsein,” or being-with-others in time. The greatest feeling of time resounds in our life’s shared history with others, a feeling ever-greater when that life is seated in some broader history still. (Whence nationalism.)

From these and so many other historico-cultural movements, phenomenal gestalten were configured into historical gestalten. The life of the body was analogized to the life of the soul (from thence to the soul of the nation), which analogies in turn shaped the horizons of experience available to individuals of a given epoch. This much and more will be expounded in my account of “Cultural Consciousness.”

For now, though, let us say that the splitting of inner and outer consciousness thus need not be a story of fallenness from an Ideal World of Pure Time into a Second Best of Historicity. Rather, this story was but one of many possible noumenal gestalten projected from a complex historical consciousness. At the current stage of historical consciousness, which is indeed a consciousness of history and historicity themselves, our own-most historicity has already structured our sense of time, and time compels our being thrown into a history shared with others. With the poetic genius of Giambattista Vico, this writing is one such event hoping to raise us into into a shared history.

Perhaps as you next flitter your eyes, you will remember it.