TIME, Stuart Elden, Aristotle, and Heidegger

SECTION IV

Doctor Stuart Elden Speaks: “ ‘Rather than place being opposed to space, understood as Cartesian, Heidegger is suggesting that space can be rethought through its relation to place, in order to return us to a more originary understanding.’ Pg. 85. ‘This thing, in its place, in its context, holding the gift, is another site for the fourfold of gods, humans, sky and earth.’ Pg. 88. [Elden quoting Heidegger] ‘The jug

(receptacle) essences the thing.’” Pg. 89. MAPPING THE PRESENT: Heidegger, Foucault, and the Project of a Spatial History, Continuum,

2001

GCM: The nun, “now” as substratum corresponds to topos, “place”.

Aristotle speaks -- “The ‘now’ corresponds to the body that is carried along . . . For it is by means of the body that is carried along that we become aware of the before and after of motion, and if we regard these as countable we get the ‘now’. Hence the ‘now’ as substratum remains the same . . . This is what is most knowable; for motion is known because of that which is moved, locomotion because of that which is carried. For what is carried is a ‘this’[todi ti, also ‘primary being’], what moves is not. Thus the ‘now’ in one sense is always the same, in another it is not the same; for this is true also of what is carried.” [219b22-33]

“ ‘When its motion is continuous A cannot either have come to be or have ceased to be at the point B: it can only have been there at a now, and not in any period of time except the whole of which the now is a dividing point.’” [262a27-31]

GCM: This makes it clear that the primary ground of any kind of personal identity that has any continuity is the personal body here and now, topos and nun. The todi ti acts as a ‘place’ where movement is able occur and be measured (“counted”) and identified, just as ‘place’ acts as a boundary in which change of viewpoint can be contextualized as a kind of map giving you position in the world and identity to the change.

Heidegger, who always starts from Aristotle, says, “Time is not an emotion, not a mood, and not a psychological attunement, although such states may have a peculiar relation to time. One may only point at boredom [Langeweille, a long while], a phenomenon indicating a relationship to time in its very name . . .” ZOLLIKON SEMINARS, ed. Menard Boss, trans. Mayr & Askay, Northwestern University Press, 2001, p.

62 German 80/81. “ ‘Misleading assumption’: On the one hand, there is time. On the other hand (GCM: Remember what I just said in Post Anal-5? Right and left hand?), there is a ‘having’ which has nothing to do with time. BUT “ ‘Our ‘ontological disposition’ [Befindlichkeit] varies from case to case, according to what we have.’” Pg. 63. “ ‘Anxiety overcomes me. What about ‘having’ in such a case of having anxiety? The having, itself, is full of anxiety. Anxiety is located just in that having. The having is being in a state of anxiety. No, anxiety in itself is this state we find ourselves in . . . Anxiety has the fundamental characteristic of an ‘ontological disposition’ that can be interpreted at any given time as ‘attunement’.”’ These issues must ALL be left open. Pg. 63. “ ‘This having, namely in the mode of expecting, making present, and retaining, is the authentic character of time. The ‘having’ in ‘having time’ is not an indifferent relationship to time as an object. Rather, it is time insofar as the human being’s ‘sojourn’ temporalizes itself in it. . . The threefold temporalizing [Zeitigen] of sojourn offers us, in each case, time for something.’” Pg, 65-66.

We may take Aristotle’s statement as a clue mere-self-sameness is always profoundly boring. It is a phenomenon that always makes us anxious for change. And thus leads to . . . . . . . . .

HEIDEGGER ON PROFOUND BOREDOM

1. "We are now no longer speaking of ourselves being bored with . . . but are saying: It is boring for one. It -for one- not for me as me, not for you as you, not for us as us, but for one. Name, standing, vocation, role, age, and fate as mine and yours disappear. To put it more clearly, precisely this 'it is boring for one' makes all these things disappear. What remains? A universal ego in general? Not by any means. For this 'it is boring for one' this boredom, does not comprise some abstraction or generalization in which a universal concept 'I in general' would be thought. Rather it is boring. This is what is decisive: that here we become an undifferentiated no one (my italics) . . .” [pp. 134/5 (203)]

2. “Evidently this profound boredom . . . must in turn be temporalized in terms of passing the time, as something against which our passing of time can turn.” [135]

3. “Now, in this 'it is boring for one', we no longer even attain this evasion in the face of boredom. Passing the time is missing in this boredom . . . To no longer permit any passing the time means to let this boredom be overpowering. This entails already understanding this boredom in its overpowering nature . . .” [135]

4. “We now have a being compelled to listen (just pure waiting) . . . The 'it is boring for one' has already transposed us into a realm of power over which the individual person, the public individual subject, no longer has any power . . .” [136]

5. “a)Being left empty as Dasein's being delivered over to beings' telling refusal of themselves as a whole . . .

“But what emptiness is this, when we are not explicitly seeking any particular fulfillment and do not leave even our own self behind in this being left empty? . . . We want nothing from the particular beings in the contingent situation as these very beings . . . We want nothing is already due to the boredom . . . We are not merely relieved of our everyday personality . . . but simultaneously also elevated beyond the particular situation . . . and beyond the specific beings surrounding us there . . . It makes everything of equally great and equally little worth . . . It takes us back to the point where all and everything appears indifferent to us . . .” [137]

6. “This indifference of things and of ourselves with them is the result of each and everything at once becoming indifferent . . . All of a sudden everything is enveloped and embraced by this indifference. Beings have become indifferent as a whole, and we ourselves . . . are not excepted . . . Beings as a whole . . . show themselves precisely as such in their indifference.”

7. “ . . . What is individual about us ourselves and familiar to us recedes, and is made to recede in this way by boredom itself.”

8. “ . . . ‘It is boring for one’ approaches us more closely if we note that passing the time is missing from it . . . Passing the time . . . emerges from boredom itself by way of our here no longer permitting any passing the time in general. This means that we abandon ourselves to this boredom as something which becomes overpowering in us and which we understand in a certain way in this overpowering, without being able to explain it while we are bored, or even wanting to explain it.” [138-9]

9. “. . . Being left empty is here no longer the absence of a particular satisfaction through being occupied with something-we do not seek such a thing at all . . . All beings stand in a strange indifference all at once . . . If we ourselves belong to these things that have become indifferent, then it is surely a matter of indifference whether we are satisfied or left empty . . . Being left empty [a mere place or boundary] is always possible when only where there is some claim to being fulfilled, where the necessity of a fullness exists; it is not the indifference of emptiness . . . Even this being left empty, is indifferent, i. e., impossible . . . This determinacy of Dasein is not connected to the petty I-ness that is familiar to us . . . In this boredom the beings that surround us offer us no further possibility of acting and no further possibility of our doing anything . . . We find ourselves-as Dasein-left entirely in the lurch . . .” [139]

10. “And yet this 'it is boring for one' does not have the character of despair . . . Without an essential transformation . . . into another attunement, this profound boredom never leads to despair . . . Beings' telling refusal of themselves as a whole . . . is a making manifest of . . . the very possibilities of doing and acting . .” [140]

11. There occurs the dawning of possibilities that Dasein could have, but which are left unexploited precisely in this ‘it is boring for one’, and as unexploited leave us in the lurch . . . In telling refusal there lies a reference to something else . . . Being left empty . . . has in itself a structured relation to something else . . . pointing to the possibilities left unexploited . . . [141]

12. “The telling refusal . . . points to them and makes them known in refusing them . . . This telling refusal on the part of beings as a whole merely indicates indeterminately the possibilities of Dasein, of its doing and acting indirectly and in general . . . in all interpretation of what is essential in every field and area of Dasein, there comes the point at which all knowledge and in particular all learned wisdom is of no further assistance. (141-142)

POSTERIOR ANALYTICS, Book II Beta, chapter 19, 99b15-100b17

TIME

SECTION V

ARISTOTLE SPEAKS: “It is clear, then, that time is number of movement in respect of the before and after, and is continuous since it is an attribute of what is continuous.” [220a25-26]

2. “There is the same time everywhere at once, but not the same time before and after; for while the present change is one, the change which has happened and that which will happen are different.” {220b5-7]

3. “We are heedless of time in circumstances in which we do not discern a change because the self [psyche] appears to continue in a single undivided state.” [218b29-32]

4. “Both ‘earlier’ and ‘later’ are relative to a present, which is the common boundary of the past and the future; so that, since any present is in time, what is at some remove from the present, whether earlier or later, is also in time.” [223a4-8]

I am assuming “relative” means “derived from” and “dependant on” for their existence since it would seem there could be no past or future without a present. Does being ‘heedless of time’ necessarily make one bored? Does being profoundly bored always make one restless or anxious? Or only sometimes? If ‘sometimes’, what dissatisfies one with profound boredom?

5. “However, we may well ask how in the world time is related to a living self [psyche] and why time seems to be everywhere . . . Time, as a number, is an attribute or state of a process; heaven, earth, and sea are all subject to movement because they are in place; and the things potentially or actually in time and potentially or actually in process are, respectively, identical. Then, as to the former question, would there be any time if there were no living self? Without a being able to count, there would be nothing countable, and therefore no number; hence, in the absence of a living or rational being to do [pephuke] the counting, time would seem to be impossible . . . To say that the things that come into being form a circle is to say that there is a circle of time; and this is to say that it is measured by the circular movement; for apart from the counting nothing else is observed in what is counted; the whole is just a plurality of countings.

BORing!!!! . . . Any ‘more than’ sensation and memory rests on a dubious base since that has to be the imagination – or better -- it is a pragmatic fiction. Aristotle’s word ‘Phantasm’ is perfect for the situation even with its modern overtones. Sense impressions are just ‘there’, present, and unchanging in the ‘Now’ as what is literally experienced. “Change” only exists within comparison, ‘past’ sense impressions with what is present. Sense impressions themselves do not compare themselves within present sensation. A ‘memory’ of a sense impression is not a real “sense impression” since memory is the imaginative (image, phantasm) comparison of the fictional ‘past’, a ‘now’, nun, which is not present but has to be ‘present’, a secondary and imaginative presence, in order to compare, which is a contradiction, with what is present to you now. But the present Now includes the fictional past and future which, though necessary fictions, do not and cannot exist except as imaginative reflections of the Present Now.

Aristotle considers time, in PHYSICS, Bk IV, chapter 14, 217b30-224a17, amongst other things, as number.

6. “The before and after are attributes of movement, and time is these qua movement . . . thus it is of each movement that time is the number.”

But the “before” and “after” do not have independent existence like the immediate Now does. Aristotle says, “The ‘now’ is the boundary of the past and future” and from that says “Since ‘nows’ are in time, the before and the after are in time to.” Unfortunately the Perseus site does not have the Greek text for the PHYSICS. I have been quoting from the Hardie and Gaye translation in the Princeton COMPLETE WORKS which, for some strange reason, seems much better – or coherent on time -- than Richard Hope, so good on topos. Richard Hope, however, does have an illuminating translation of one of the key passages [223a5-9]:

7. “But what is earlier is in time: both ‘earlier’ and ‘later’ are relative to a present, which is the common boundary of the past and the future; so that, since any present is in time, what is at some remove from the present, whether earlier or later, is also in time.”

In other words (to make my point), ‘earlier’ and ‘later’ are “relative” to H & G’s “now”, nun, and the “now” is “the common boundary of the past and future”. “Since any ‘now’ is in time, what is . . . ‘earlier’ and ‘later’ are also in time.” So what is the difference between “now” and “time”?

Time is number, but is that all? H & G have:

8. ‘So, too, movements that have simultaneous limits have the same time, yet the one may in fact be fast and the other not, and the one may be locomotion and the other alteration; still the time of the two changes is the same if it is both equal and simultaneous; and for this reason, while the movements are different and separate, the time is everywhere the same, because the number of equal and simultaneous movements is everywhere one and the same.’[223b8-12]

Now, how is time “everywhere the same”? Now, this is important because a propositional universal, composed of words, is necessarily open to question and therefore change. Therefore since a propositional universal cannot be “everywhere the same”, we are radically brought back to your universal perceived by nous as either intuition or comprehension as in Aristotle’s “Perception is of universals” [100b1].