Thank you very much Paul,
specially to spend some of your precious time answering my querries.
-----Mensagem original-----
De: Paul H.Dillon <illonph@pacbell.net>
Para: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Data: Domingo, 13 de Maio de 2001 18:54
Assunto: On time
>Ricardo,
>
>I have always been fascinated with the question of time and not so long ago
>on xmca we time in relation to Jay Lemke's paper, during the course of
which
>we also peered briefly at Bergson's distinction of lived time v. linear
>time. Heidegger's deconstruction of Aristotelian time in Fundamental
>Problems of Phenomenology is, in my opinion, one of the most lucid
>demonstrations of the peculiarity of the "Western" concept of time that
>Aristotle delineated most explicitly but which is nevertheless implicit in
>any attempt to posit an "objective" time; including that of modern physics.
>
>Time in any event is not a "truth". It is a dimension of experience that is
>acknowledged in all cultures and as such a constitutive element of human
>experience although the way it is reflectively posited varies. Two
>modalities are mpw generally acknowledged as a result of Mircea Eliade's
>discussion of "sacred" and "profane" time which has degenerated into
>"circular" v. "linear" time for many. There's no reason to believe that
>these categories accomodate all the ways that people have of accounting for
>time as something objectively existent. I find it more illuminating to
look
>at the experience of time rather than the secondary models.
>
>Marx's doctoral dissertation discussion of Epicurus' concept of time
>(available on the Marxist Internet Archive) is quite good and succinct.
For
>example:
>
>
>"Time, in contrast, the change of the finite to the extent that change is
>posited as change, is just as much the real form which separates appearance
>from essence, and posits it as appearance, while leading it back into
>essence. Composition expresses merely the materiality of the atoms as well
>as of nature emerging from them. Time, in contrast, is in the world of
>appearance what the concept of the atom is in the world of essence, namely,
>the abstraction, destruction and reduction of all determined being into
>being-for-itself."
>
>Which could be considered a very technical way of describing the essence of
>time as "all things must pass", being-in-itself, that which doesn't
change,
>what has happened doesn't change.
>
> Also:
>
>"Indeed, time being the abstract form of sensation, according to the
atomism
>of Epicurean consciousness the necessity arises for it to be fixed as a
>nature having a separate existence within nature. The changeability of the
>sensuous world, its change as change, this reflection of appearance in
>itself which constitutes the concept of time, has its separate existence in
>conscious sensuousness. Human sensuousness is therefore embodied time, the
>existing reflection of the sensuous world in itself."
>
>This is most interesting for two reasons (1) the idea that sensousness is
>embodied time and (2) the way in which time is attributed an appearance
>which in fact it doesn't possess; time really never appears, time is
>determined to exist as that which continuously negates appearance; all
>things pass, all appearance is change. This posited reflection of time as
>objectively appearing has its parallel in the positing of the ego
>itself--something which even Kant commented on in his discussion of time in
>the Transcendental Aesthetic (Critique of Pure Reason.) I've experienced
>the similarity also in the state of total absorbtion in which could be
>equally described as "having lost/forgotten myself" and "time seemed to
>stop". .
>
>There is a quite interesting collection of studies on the different
cultural
>concepts of time published by UNESCO in 1975 originally as "Les cultures et
>le temp" (contains essays by Paul Ricoeur and Aron Gurevitch) which was
>translated into Spanish (Las Culturas y el Tiempo, Editorial Sigueme 1979)
>but I'm not sure if it was translated into English. I find such studies
>much more enlightening than such publications as the National Geographics
>"The Mystery of Time" which sets up the instrumentalist time system of
>modern physics as "the objective truth" about time.
>
>Paul H. Dillon
>
>
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