William James, 1890, _Principles of Psychology_
Something which Ana Shane wrote, about the emotional content of re-calling
one's past, reminded me of David Levin's (1989) _The Listening Self:
Personal growth, social shange, and the closure of metaphysics_
He writes,
"The 'time' of our everydayness is not an absolute reality; it is an
institutionalized
projection of our self-limited condition. This condition is ruled by
ego-logical attachments, and by the anxieties and defenses these
attachments bring out. We may, for example, become obsessively attached to
the painfulness of our past [e.g. Soren Kierkegaard] or the satisfaction
that once filled our past, so that we are unable to let go, unable to
forget, unable to let the past be the past. Some people...are driven by
what [Freud] called a 'repetition compulsion', endlessly repeating the pain
of the past. Other people cannot let got of their past because they are
fixated on its satisfactions. Such people cannot derive any pleasure from
the present. But there are also people who experience a paralysing anxiety
in relation to the future, because they are absolutely certain that the
future can only bring them more suffering. (They may be right.) And then
there are people who are totally attached to the future - people who live
only for the future, always disenchanted with the past and the present
because they are caught up in their fantasies about the future [e.g.,
Nietzsche.] There are also people who withdraw into an empy present,
cutting themselves off from their past and living without any hope, any
openness to future possibilities." (261)
This (too) long excerpt describes, I think, the ways we all construct very
intimate relations to time; and it is our relationship with
ourselves-in-time which
substantiate our own "ideas" about time....
Levin's point is that suffering is built into human existence [a la Freud] and
philosophy must find a way to account for how this suffering organizes the
ways we naviagte our day-to-day: time, as Mike and Ana note, is memory: as
Levin notes, memories are most often organized on a basis of painfulness -
the least painful memories are accessible, the most painful are not.
In other words, memories are selectively organized in relation to the
degrees of suffering which occur...
diane
"Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right."
Ani Difranco
*********************************
diane celia hodges
faculty of education
university of british columbia
vancouver, bc canada
tel: (604)-253-4807
email: dchodges who-is-at interchange.ubc.ca