Time, Magic and the Self (I/III)

There is.

Isn’t it? Would you agree? Well, I would not. In other words, to say ‘There is.’ is infinitesimally close to a misunderstanding. Or a neglect, if you prefer. It is not the missing of a referent, though, at least not in first instance. The problem would be almost the same if we would have said ‘There is x’. It is the temporal aspect that is missing. Without considering the various aspects of temporality of the things that build up our world, we could neither understand the things nor the world.

Nowadays, the probability for finding some agreement for such a claim is somewhat higher than it once was, in the high tides of modernism. For most urbanists and architects, time was nothing but a somewhat cumbrous parameter, yet nothing of any deeper structural significance. The modern city was a city without time, after breaking the traditions, even not creating new ones. Such was the claim, which is properly demonstrated by Simon Sadler [1] citing Ron Herron, group member of Archigram.

“Living City”1 curator Ron Herron described his appreciation of “Parallel of Life and Art”: It was most extraordinary because it was primarily photographic and with apparently no sequence; it jumped around like anything.

Unfortunately, and beyond the mere “functioning,” the well-organized disorg-anization itself became a tradition. Koolhaas called it Junkspace [2]. Astonishingly, and not quite compatible to the admiration of dust-like scatterings that negate relationality, Archigram claims to be interested in, if not focused to life and behavior. Sadler summarizes (p.55)

“Living City” and its catalogue were not about traditional architectural form, but its opposite: the formlessness of space, behavior, life.

Obviously, Sadler himself is not quite aware about the fact that behavior is predominantly a choreography, that is, it is about form and time as well as form in time. The concepts of form and behavior as implied by Archigram’s utopias are indeed very strange.

Basically, the neglect of time beyond historicity is typical for modern/modernist architects, urbanists and theorists up to our days, including Venturi [2], Tschumi [4] or Oswald [5]. Even Koolhaas does not refer expressis verbis to it, albeit he is constantly in a close orbit of it. This is astonishing since key concepts in the immediate neighborhood of time such as semiotics, narration or complexity are indeed mentioned by these authors. Yet, without a proper image of time one remains on the level of mere phenomena. We will discuss this topic of time on the one side and architects and architecture on the other later in more detail.

Authors like Sigfried Giedion [6] or Aldo Rossi [7] didn’t change much concerning the awareness for time in the practice of architecture and urbanism. Maybe, partly because their positions have been more self-contradictive than consistent. On the one hand they demanded for a serious consideration of time, on the other hand they still stuck to rather strong rationalism. Rationalist time, however, is much less than just half of the story. Another salient reason is certainly given by the fact that time is a subject that is notoriously difficult to deal with. As Mike Sandbothe cites Paul Ricoeur [8]:

Ultimately, for Ricoeur time marks the „mystery“ of our thinking, which resists representation by encompassing our Dasein in a way that is ineluctable for our thinking.2

This Essay

One of the large hypotheses that I have been following across the last essays is that we will not be able to understand the Urban3 and architecture without a proper image of differentiation. Both parts of this notion, the “image” and the “differentiation” need some explication.

Despite “differentiation” seems to be similar to change, they are quite different from each other. The main reason being that differentiation comprises an activity, which, according to Aristotle has serious consequences. Mary Louise Gill [9] summarizes his distinction as follows:

Whereas a change is brought about by something other than the object or by the object itself considered as other (as when a doctor cures himself), an activity is brought about by the object itself considered as itself. This single modification yields an important difference: whereas a change leads to a state other than the one an object was previously in, an activity maintains or develops what an object already is.4

In other terms, in case of change it is proposed that it is relatively unconstrained, hence with less memory and historicity implied, while activity, or active differentiation implies a greater weight of historicity, less contingency, increased persistence and thus an increased intensity of being in time.

Besides this fundamental distinction we may discern several modes of differentiation. The question then is, how to construct a proper “whole” of that. Obviously we can think of different such compound “wholes,” which is the reason for our claim that we need a proper image of differentiation.

Now to the other part of the notion of the “image of differentiation,” the image. An “image” is much more than a “concept.” It is more like a diagram about the possibility to apply the concept, the structure of its use. The aspect of usage is, of course, a crucial one. Actually, with respect to the relation between concepts and actions we identified the so-called “binding problem”. The binding problem claims that there is no direct, unmediated way from concepts to actions, or the reverse. Models are needed, both formalizable structural models, being more close to concepts, and anticipatory models, being more close to the implementation of concepts. The operationalization of concepts may be difficult. Yet, action without heading to get contact to concepts is simply meaningless. (The reason for the emptiness of ‘single case’-studies.) Our overall conclusion regarding the binding problem was that it is the main source for frictions and even failure in the control and management of society, if it is not properly handled, if concepts and actions are not mediated by a layer of “Generic Differentiation.” Only the layer of “Generic Differentiation” with its possibility for different kinds of models can provide the basic conditions to speak about and to conceive any of the mechanisms potentially relevant for the context at hand. Such, the binding problem is probably one of the most frequent causes for many, many difficulties concerning the understanding, designing and dealing with the Urban, or its instances, the concrete city, the concrete settlement or building, the concrete neighborhood.

This transition between concept and action (or vice versa) can’t be fully comprised by language alone. For a certain reasons we need a diagram. “Generic Differentiation”, comprising various species of probabilistic, generalized networks, is conceived as part of a larger compound—we may call it “critical pragmatics”—, as it mediates between concepts and actions. Finally we ended up with the following diagram.

Figure 1: “Critical Pragmatics for active Subjects.” The position of Generic Differentiation is conceived as a necessary layer between the domains of concepts and actions, respectively. See text below for details and the situs where we developed it.

Note, that this diagram just shows the basic module of a more complete diagram, which in the end would form a moebioid fractal due to self-affine mapping: this module appears in any of the three layers in a nested fashion. Hence, a more complete image would show this module as part of a fractal image, which however could not be conceived as a flat fractal, such like a leaf of fern.5 The image of pragmatics as it is shown above is first a fractal due to the self-affine mapping. Second, however, the instances of the module within the compound are not independent, as in case of the fern. Important traces of the same concepts appear at various levels of the fractal mapping, leading to dimensional braids, in other words to a moebioid.

So, as we are now enabled for approaching it, let us return to the necessity of considering the various aspects of temporality. What are they in general, and what in case of architecture, the city, the Urban, or Urban Reason? Giedion, for instance, related to time with regard to the historicity and with regard to an adaptation of the concept of space-time from physics, which at that time was abundantly discussed in science and society. This adaptation, according to Giedion, can be found in simultaneity and movement. A pretty clear statement, one might think. Yet, as we will see, he conceived of these two temporal forms of simultaneity and movement in a quite unusual way that is not really aligned to the meaning that it bears in physics.

Rossi, focusing more on urban aspects, denotes quite divergent concepts of time. He did not however clearly distinguish or label them. He as well refers to history, but he also says that a city has “many times” (p.61 in [7]), a formulation that reminds to Bergson’s durée. Given the cultural “sediments” of a city within itself, its multiply folded traces of historical times, such a proposal is easy to understand, everybody could agree upon it.

Besides the multiplicity of referential historical time—we will make the meaning of this more clear below—, Rossi also proposes implicitly a locality of time through the acceleration of urbanization through primary elements such as “monuments”, or building that own a “monumental” flavor. Unfortunately, he neither does refer to an operationalization of his time concept nor does he provide his own. In other words, he still refers to time only implicitly, by describing the respective changes and differentiations on an observational level.

These author’s proposals provide important hints, no doubt. Yet, we certainly have to clarify them from the perspective of time itself. This equals firstly an inversion of the perspective from architectural or urbanismic vantage point taken by Giedion and Rossi, who in both cases started from built matter. Before turning to architecture, we have to be clear about time. As a second consequence, we have to be cautious when talking about time. We have to uncover and disclose the well-hidden snares before we are going to push the investigation of the relation between temporality and architecture further down.

For instance, both Giedion and Rossi delivered an analysis. This analyticity results in a pair of consequences. Either it is, firstly, just useful for sorting out the past, but not for deriving schemes for synthesis and production, or, secondly, it requires an instantiation that would allow to utilize the abstract content of their analysis for taking action. Such an instantiation could produce hints for a design process that is directed to the future. Yet, neither Giedion [6] nor Rossi [7] did provide such schemes. Most likely precisely due to the fact that they did not refer to a proper image of time!

This essay is the first of two in a row about the “Time of Architecture”. As Yeonkyung Lee and Sungwoo Kim [10] put it, there is much need for its investigation. In order to do so, however, one has to be clear about time and its conception(s). Insofar we will attempt to trace time as a property of architecture and less as an accessory, we also have to try to liberate time from its distinctive link to human consciousness without sacrificing the applicability of the respective conception to the realm of the human.

Hence, the layout of this essay is straightforward.

(a) First we will introduce a synopsis on various conceptions of time as brief as possible, taking into account a few, and probably the most salient sources. This will equip us with possible distinctions about modes or aspects of time as well as the differences between and interdependencies of time and space.

In architecture and urbanism, almost no reference can be found to philosophical discourses about time. Things are handled intuitively, leading to interesting but not quite valuable and usable approaches. We will see that the topic of “time” raises some quite fundamental issues, reaching at least into the field of hermeneutics, semiotics, narratology, and of course philosophy as well. The result will be a more or less ranked list of images of time as it is possible from a philosophical vantage point.

(b) Before the background of this explication and the awareness for all the possible misunderstandings around the issue of time, we will introduce a radically different perspective. We will ask how nature “creates time”. More precisely, we will ask about the abstract elements and mechanisms that are suitable for “creating time.” As weird this may seem at first, I think it is even a necessary question. And for sure nobody else posed this question ever before (outside of esoterics, perhaps, nut we do not engage in esoterics here!).

The particularity of that approach is that the proposed structure would work as a basis for deriving an operationalization for the interpretation of material systems as well as an abstract structure for a foundation of philosophical arguments about time. Of course, we have to be very careful here in order to avoid falling back into naturalist or phenomenological naiveties. Yet, carefulness will allow us to blend the several perspectives onto time into a single one, without—and that’s pretty significant—reducing time to either space or formal exercises like geometry. Such, the reward will be a completely new image of time, one that is much more general than any other and which overcomes the traditional separations, for instance that which pulls apart physical time and time of experience. Another effect will be that the question about the origin of time will vanish, a question which is continuously being discussed in cosmology (and theology, perhaps, as well).

(c) From the new perspective then we will revisit architecture and the Urban (in the next essay). We will not only return to Giedion, Rossi, or Koolhaas but we also will revisit the “Behavioral Turn” that we have been introducing some essays ago.

Displayed in condensed form, our program comprises the following three sections:

• (a) Time itself as a subject of philosophy.
• (b) The creation of time.
• (c) Time of Architecture.

Before we start a few small remark shall be in order. First, it may well appear as somewhat presumptuous to try to handle time in sufficient depth within just one or two sections of a single essay. I am fully aware about this. Yet, the pressure to condense the subject matter also helps to focus, to achieve a structural picture on the large scale. Second, it should be nevertheless clear that we can’t provide a comprehensive overview or summary about the various conceptions of time in philosophy and science, as interesting this would have been. It would exceed even the possibilities of a sumptuous book. Instead, I will lay out my arguments by means of a purposeful selection, enriched with some annotations.

On the other hand this will provide one of the very rare comprehensive inquiries about time, and the first one that synthesizes a perspective that is backward compatible to those authors to whom it should.

Somewhat surprising, this could even include (theoretical) physics. Yet, the issue is quite complex and very different from mainstream, versions of which you may find in [27, 28]. Even as there are highly interesting and quite direct links to philosophy, I decided to put this into a separate essay, which hopefully will happen soon. Just to give you a tiny glimpse on it: Once Richard Feynman called his mentor and adviser John Wheeler in the middle of the night, asking him, “How many electrons are there in the universe?” According to the transmission Wheeler answered: “There is exactly one.” Sounds odd, doesn’t it? Nevertheless it may be that there are indeed only a few of them, according to Robbert Dijkgraaf, who also proposes that space-time is an emergent “property,” while information could be conceived as more fundamental than those. This, however, has a rather direct counterpart in the metaphysics of Spinoza, who claimed that there is only 1 single attribute. Or (that’s not an unhumbleness), take our conception of information that we described earlier. Anyway, you may have got the point.

The sections in the remainder of this essay are the following. Note that in this piece we will provide only chapter 1 and 2. The other chapters from “Synthesis” onwards will follow as a separate piece.

• 1. Time in Philosophy—A Selection
• Aristotle
• Pseudo-Paradoxes
• Heidegger
• Bergson
• Peirce
• Ricoeur
• Wittgenstein
• Kant
• 2. Synopsis
• The following sections will be included in the next essay
• 3. Synthesis of Time
• 3.1. Complexity, recapitulated
• 3.2. The paradigmatic Heart
• 3.3. Consolidation
• 4. The Self as an Issue of Temporality
• 5. Time of Architecture

1. Time in Philosophy—A Selection

Since antiquity people have been distinguishing two aspects of time. It was only in the course of the success of modern physics and engineering that this distinction has been gone forgotten in the Western world’s common sense. The belief set of modernism with its main pillar of metaphysical independence may have been contributing as well. Anyway, the ancient Greeks assigned them the two gods of chronos and kairos. While the former was referring to measurable clock-time, the second denoted the opportune time. The opportune time is a certain period of time that is preferential to accomplish an action, argument, or proof, which includes all parts and parties of the setting. The kairos clearly exceeds experience and points to the entirety of consummation. The advantage of taking into account means and ends is accompanied by the disadvantage of a significant inseparability.

Aristotle

Aristotle, of course, developed an image of time that is much richer, more detailed and much less mystical. For him, change and motion are apriori to time [11]. Aristotle is careful in conceiving change and motion without reference to time, which then gets determined as “a number of change with respect to the before and after” (Physics 219 b 1-2). Hence, it is possible for him to conceive of time as essentially countable, whereas change is not. Here, it is also important to understand Aristotle’s general approach of hylemorphism, which states that—in a quite abstract sense—substance always consists of a matter-aspect and a form-aspect [11]. So also for time. For him, the matter-aspect is given by its kinetic, which includes change, while the form aspect shows up in a kind of order6. Time is a kind of order is not, as is commonly supposed, a kind of measure, as Ursula Coope argues [13]. Aristotle’s use of “number” (arithmos) is more a potential for extending operations, as opposed to “measure” (metron), which is imposed to the measured. Hence, “order” does not mean that this order is necessarily monotone. It is an universal order within which all changes are related to each other. Of course, we could reconstruct a monotone order from that, but as said, it is not a necessity. Another of the remarkable consequences of Aristotle’s conception is that without an counting instance—call it observer or interpretant —there is no time.

This role of the interpreter is further explicated by Aristotle with respect to the form of the “now”. Roark summarizes that we have understand that

[…] phantasia (“imagination”) plays a crucial role in perception, as Aristotle understands it, and therefore also in his account of time. Briefly, phantasia serves as the basis for both memory and anticipation, thereby making possible the possession of mental states about the past and the future. (p.7)

Actually, the most remarkable property of Aristotle’s conception is that he is able to overcome the duality between experience and physical time by means of the interpretant.

Pseudo-Paradoxes

It is not by chance alone that Augustine denied the Aristotelian conception by raising his infamous paradox about time. He does so from within Christian cosmogony. First he argues that the present time vanishes, if we try to take close look. Then he claims that both past and future are only available in the present. The result is that time is illusory. Many centuries later, Einstein would pose the same claim. Augustine transposed the problem of time into one of the relation between the soul and God. For him, no other “solution” would have been reasonable. Augustine instrumentalises a misunderstanding of references, established by mixing incompatible concepts (or language games). Unfortunately, Augustine inaugurated a whole tradition of nonsense, finally made persistent by McTaggart’s purported proof of the illusion of time [14] where he extended Augustine’s already malformed argument into deep nonsense, creating on the way the distinction between A-series (past, present and future) and B-series (earlier, later) of time. It is perpetuated until our days by author’s like Oaklander [15][16] or Power [17]. Actually, the position is so nonsensical and misplaced—Bergson called it a wrong problem, Wittgenstein a grammatical mistake—that we will not deal with it further7.

Heidegger

Heidegger explicitly refers to phenomenology as it has been shaped by Edmund Husserl. Yet, Heidegger recognized that phenomenology—as well as the implied ontology of Being—suffers from serious defects. Thus, we have to take a brief look onto it.

With the rise of phenomenology towards the end of the 19th century, the dualistic mapping of the notion of time has been reintroduced and reworked. Usually, a distinction has been made between clock-time on the one hand and experiential time on the other. This may be regarded indeed as quite similar to the ancient position. Yet, philosophically it is not interesting to state such. Instead we have to ask about the relation between the two. The same applies to the distinction of time and space.

There are two main positions dealing with this dualism. On the one side we find Bergson, on the other Brentano and Husserl as founders of phenomenology. Both refer to consciousness as an essential element of time. Of course, we should not forget that this is one of the limitations we have to overcome, if we want to achieve a generalized image of time.

Phenomenology suffers from a serious defect, which is given by the assumption of subjects and objects as apriori entities. The object is implied as a consequence of the consciousness of the subject, yet this did not result in a constructivism à la Maturana. Phenomenology, as an offspring of 19th century modernism and a close relative of logicism, continued and radicalized the tendency of German Idealism to think that the world could be accessed “directly”. In the words of Thomas Sheehan [19]:

And finally phenomenology argued that the being of entities is known not by some after-the-fact reflection or transcendental construction but directly and immediately by way of a categorical intuition.

There are two important consequences of that. Firstly, it violates the primacy of interpretation8 and has to assume a world-as-such, which in other words translates into a fundamentally static world. Secondly, there is no relation between to appearances of an object across time.

Heidegger, in “Being and Time” [21] (original “Sein und Zeit” [22]), tried to correct this defect of phenomenology and ontology by a hermeneutic transformation of phenomenology. This would remove the central role of consciousness, which is replaced by the concept of the “Being-there” (Dasein) and so by the “Analysis of Subduity.” He clearly states (end of §3 in “Being and time”) that any ontology has to be fundamental ontology. The Being-there (Dasein) however needs— in order to be able to see its Being—temporality.

The fundamental ontological task of the interpretation of being as such, therefore, includes working out the Temporality of being. The concrete answer to the question of the sense of being is given for the first time in the exposition of the problematic of Temporality. ([22], p.19)

How is temporality described? In §65 Heidegger writes:

Coming back to itself futurally, resoluteness brings itself into the Situation by making present. The character of “having been” arises from the future, and in such a way that the future which “has been” (or better, which “is in the process of having been”) releases from itself the Present. This phenomenon has the unity of a future which makes present in the process of having been; we designate it as “temporality”.9

Time clearly “delimits” Being as a conditioning horizon:

[…] we require an originary explication of time as the horizon of the understanding of being in terms of temporality as the being of Dasein who understands being. ([22], p.17)

Heidegger examines thoroughly the embedding of Being-there into time and the conditioning role of “time.” For instance, we can understand a tool only with respect to its future use. Temporality itself is seen as the structure of “care”, a major constitutive of the being of Dasein, which similarly to anticipation carries a strong reference to the future:

The originary unity of the structure of care lies in temporality” ([22], p.327).

Temporality is the meaning and the foundation of Being.10 Temporality is an Existential. Existential analysis claims that Being-there does not fill space, it is not within spatiality (towards the end of §70):

Only on the basis of its ecstatico-horizontal temporality is it possible for Dasein to break into space. The world is not present-at-hand in space; yet, only within a world does space let itself be discovered. The ecstatical temporality of the spatiality that is characteristic of Dasein, makes it intelligible that space is independent of time; but on the other hand, this same temporality also makes intelligible Dasein’s ‘dependence’ on space—a ‘dependence’ which manifests itself in the well-known phenomenon that both Dasein’s interpretation of itself and the whole stock of significations which belong to language in general are dominated through and through by ‘spatial representations’. This priority of the spatial in the Articulation of concepts and significations has its basis not in some specific power which space possesses, but in Dasein’s kind of Being. Temporality is essentially deterioriating11, and it loses itself in making present; […]

This concept of temporality could have been used to overcome the difference between “vulgar time” (chronos) and experiential time, to which he clearly sub-ordinated the former. Well, “could have been” if Heidegger’s program would have been completable. But Heidegger finally failed, “Being and Time” remained fragmentary. There are several closely related aspects for this failure. Ultimately, perhaps, as Cristina Lafont [24] argues, it is impossible to engage in a radical program of detranscendentalization and at the same time to try to achieve a fundamental foundation. This pairs with the inherited phenomenological habit to disregard the primacy of interpretation. The problem for Heidegger now is that the sign in the language is already in the world which has to be subdued. As Lafont brilliantly revealed, Heidegger still adheres to the concept of language as an “ontic” instrument, as something that is found in the outer world. Yet, this must count simply as a highly inappropriate reduction. Language constantly and refracted points towards the inwardly settled translation between body and thought and the outward directed translation between thought and community (of speakers), while translation is also kind of a rooting. Such we can conclude that ultimately Heidegger therefore still follows the phenomenological subject-object scheme. His attempt for a fundamental foundation while avoiding any reference to transcendent horizons must fail, even if this orientation towards the fundamental pretends to just serve as an indirect “foundation” (see below).

There is a striking similarity between Augustine and Heidegger. We could call it metaphysical linearity as a cosmological element. In case of Augustine it is induced by the believe in Salvation, in case of Heidegger by the believe into an absolute beginning paired with a (implicit) believe to step out of language. In a lecture held in 1963, that is 36 years after Being and Time, titled “Time and Being”, Heidegger revisits the issue of time. Yet, he simply capitulated from the problem of foundations, referring to “intuitional insight” as a foundation. In the speech “Time and Being” hold in 1962 [25], he said

To think the Being in its own right requires to dismiss Being as the originating reason of being-Being (des Seienden), in favor of the Giving that is coveredly playing in its Decovering (Entbergen), i.e. of the “There is as giving fateness.”12 (p.10)13

Here, Heidegger refutes foundational ontology in favour of the communal and external world by he concept of the Giving14. Yet, the step towards the communal still remains a very small step, since now not only the Other gets depersonalized as far as possible. The real serious issue here is that Heidegger now replaces the ontological conception of “ontic” language by the “ontic” communal. He still does not understand the double-articulation of the communal through language. We may say that Heidegger is struck by blindness (on his right eye).

Inga Römer [47] detects a certain kind of archaism throughout the philosophy of Heidegger, which comes along as a still not defeated thinking about origins.

Finally, in „Being and Time“ Heidegger detects the origin of time in the event, which he dedicatedly determines as the provider [m: the Giving] of Being and time. This Giving is seen as being divested from itself. The event, determined by Heidegger elsewhere as a singular tantum, is eliminated from itself—and nevertheless the event is conceived as the origin of time.15 (p.289)

Many years after the publication of “Being and Time”, in the context of the seminar “Time and Being” Heidegger claimed that he did not conceive fundamental ontology as kind of a foundation. He described the role of the Daseins-analytics as proposed in “Being and Time” in the following way [23]:

Being and Time is in fact on the way to find, taking the route through the timeness of Dasein in the interpretation of Being as temporality, a conception of time, that Owned of “time”, whence “Being” reveals itself as Presenting. Such however it is said that the fundamental mentioned in the fundamental ontology can’t take reference and synthesis. Instead, the whole analytics of Dasein ought to be repeated, subsequent of possibly having thrown light upon the sense of Being, in a more pristinely and completely different manner.16

Indeed, “Being and Time” remained fragmentary, Heidegger recognized the inherent incompatibility of the still transcendental alignment with the conception of the Dasein and was hence forced to shift the target of the Daseins-analytics [26](p.99). Being is not addressed from the vantage point of being-Being (Seiendes) anymore. It resulted in a replacement of the sense of Being by the question about the historical truth of Being as fateness. In the course of that shift, however, temporality lost its role, too, and was replaced by a thinking of a historized event. This event is conceived as kind of a non-spatial endurance [25]:

Time-Space (m: endurance) now denotes the open that in the mutually-serving-one-another of arrival, having been (Gewesenheit) and present clears itself. Only this open spacingly allows (räumt ein) the ordinarily known space its propagation. (p.19)17

As far as this move could be taken as a cure of the methodological problems in “Being and Time,” it turned out, however, to be far detrimental for Heidegger’s whole philosophy. He was forced to determine man by his ecstatic exposition and being-thrown (tossed?) into nothingness. Care as kind of cautious anticipation was replaced first by angst, then by incurable disgust through Sartre. While the early Heidegger precisely tried to cure the missing of primal relationality in phenomenology, the later Heidegger got trapped by an even more aggressive form of singularization and denial of relationality at all. This whole enterprise of existential philosophy suffers from this same deep disrespect if not abhorrence of the communal, of the practice of sharing joyfully a common language that turns into the Archimedic Point of being human. Well, how could he think differently given his particular political aberrancy?

Anyway, Heidegger’s shift to endurance brings us directly to the next candidate.

Bergson

Politically, in real life, Heidegger and Bergson could not be more different. The former more than sympathizing (up to open admiration) with totalitarianism in the form of Hitlerism and fascism, thereby matching his performative rejection of relationality, the latter engaging internationally in forming the precursor of the UN.

But, how does Bergson’s approach to time look like? For Bergson, logicism and the subject-object dichotomy are thoughts that are alien to him. Both actually have to assume a sequential order that yet have to be demonstrated in its genesis.18 The starting point for Bergson is the diagnosis that measurable time, or likewise measuring time, as it is done in physics as well by any clock-time introduces homogeneity, which in turn translates into quantificability [31]. As such, time is converted into a spatial concept, as these properties are also properties of space as physics conceives it. The consequence is that we create pseudo-paradoxes like that which has been explicated by Augustine. To this factum of quantificability Bergson then opposes qualitability. For him, quality and quantity remain incommensurable throughout his works.

At any rate, we cannot finally admit two forms of the homogeneous, Time and Space, without first seeking whether one of them cannot be reduced to the other […] Time, conceived under the form of an unbounded and homogeneous medium, is nothing but the ghost of space, haunting the reflective consciousness. ([32] p. 232)

So we can fix that time is essential a qualitative entity, or in other words, an intensity that is, according to Bergson, opposed to the extensity of spatial entities. Spatial entities are always external to each other, while for intensive entities—such as time—such an externalization is not possible. They can be thought only as a mutually interpenetrating beside-one-another, which however should be thought as an aterritorial “beside”. As Friedrich Kuemmel puts it, intensity, for Bergson, can be detached from extensity.19 Intensity then is being equipped by Bergson with a manifoldness or multiplicity that consequently establishes a reality apart from physical spatiality with its measurable time. This reality is the reality of consciousness and the soul. Bergson calls it “durée”, which of course must not be translated into “duration” (or into the German “Dauer”). Durée is more like the potential for communicable time, or in Deleuze’s words, a “potential number” ([33] p.45), to which we can refer in language literally as “referential time.”

Bergson’s notion of durée is quite easily determined (p.37)

It [durée] is a case of “transition,” of a “change,” a becoming, but it is a becoming that endures, a change that is substance itself. […] Bergson has no difficulty in reconciling the two fundamental characteristics of duration; continuity and heterogeneity. However, defined in this way, duration is not merely lived experience; […] it is already a condition of experience.

As a qualitative multiplicity, durée is opposed to quantitative multiplicity. For Bergson, this duality is a strict and unresolvable one, yet it does not set up an opposition, it is not subject of dialectic. It does, however, follow the leitmotif of Bergson, according to Deleuze ([33] p.23): People see quantitative differences where actually are differences in kind. (RRR)

Deleuze emphasizes that the two multiplicities have to be strictly distinguished ([33] p.38).

[…] the decomposition of the composite reveals to us two types of multiplicity. One is represented by space […]: it is a multiplicity of exteriority, of simultaneity, of juxtaposition, of order, of quantitative differentiation, of difference in degree; it is a numerical multiplicity, discontinuous and actual. The other type of multiplicity appears in pure duration: It is an internal multiplicity of succession, of fusion, of organization, of heterogeneity, of qualitative discrimination, or of difference in kind; it is a virtual and continuous multiplicity that cannot be reduced to numbers.

Here we may recall Aristotle’s notion of time as kind of order. This poses the question whether duration itself is a multiplicity. As Deleuze carves it out ([33] p.85):

At the heart of the question “Is duration one or multiple?” we find a completely different problem: Duration is a multiplicity, but of what type? Only the hypothesis of a single Time can, according to Bergson, account for the nature of virtual multiplicities. By confusing the two types – actual spatial multiplicity and virtual temporal multiplicity- Einstein has merely invented a new way of spatializing time.

Pushing Bergson’s architecture of time further, Deleuze develops his first accounts on virtuality. It becomes clear, that durée is a virtual entity. As such, it is outside of the realm of numbers, even outside of quantificability or quantitability. Speaking in Aristotelian terms we could say that time is a smooth manifold of kinds of orders. Again Deleuze (p.85):

Being, or Time, is a multiplicity. But it is precisely not “multiple”; it is One, in conformity with its type of multiplicity.

For Bergson, tenses are already actualizations of durée. The past is conceived as being different from the present in kind, and could not be compared to it. There is also possibility for a transition from a “past” to a “present.” It is the work of memory (as an abstract entity) that creates the link. Memory extends completely into present, though. Its main effect is to recollect the past. In this sense, memory is stepping forward. Durée and memory are co-extensive.

As we have seen, Bergson’s conception of time is strongly linked to consciousness and its particular memory. We also have seen that he considers physical time as a kind of a secondary phenomenon. He thinks that things surely have no endurance in the sense of a capability to actualize durée into an extended present.

This poses a problem: What is time in our outside? In Time and Free Will he writes [32],

Although things do not endure as we do ourselves, nevertheless, there must be some incomprehensible reason why phenomena are seen to succeed one another instead of being set out all at once. (p.227)

Well, what does this claim “things do not endure as we do ourselves” refer to? Is there endurance of things at all? And what about animals, thinking animals, or epistemic machines? As Deleuze explains, Bergson is able to solve this puzzle only by extending his durée into a cosmic principle ([33], pp.51). Yet, I think that in this case he mixes immaterial and material aspects in a quite inappropriate manner.

Bergson’s conception of time certainly has some appealing properties. But just as its much less potent rival phenomenology it is strongly anthropocentric. It can’t be generalized enough for our purposes that follow the question of time in architecture. Of course, we could conceive of architecture as a thing that is completely passive if nobody looks onto it or thinks about it. But what is then about cities? The perspective of passive things has been largely refuted, first by Heidegger through his hermeneutic perspective, and in a much more developed manner, by Bruno Latour and his Agent-Network-Theory.

In still other terms, we could say that Bergson’s philosophy suffers from a certain binding problem. I think it was precisely the binding problem that caused the hefty dispute between Einstein and Bergson. Just to be clear, in my opinion both of them failed.

Thus we need a perspective that allows to overcome the binding problem without sacrificing either the experiential time, or durée or the measurability of referential time. This perspective is provided by the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce.

Peirce

Peirce was an engineer, his formal accounts thus always pragmatic. This sets him apart from Bergson and his early devotion to mathematics. Where the former sees processes in which various parts engage, the latter sees abstract structures.

Being an engineer, Peirce looked at thought and time in a completely different manner. He starts with referential time, with clock-time. He does not criticize it at first hand as Bergson would later do.

The first step in our reconstruction of Peircean time is his move to show that neither thought nor, of course, consciousness can take place in an instant. Consciousness must be a process. Else, thought is a sign. One has to know that for Peirce, a sign is not to be mistaken as a symbol. For him it is an enduring situation. We will return to this point later.

In MS23720 (chapter IV in Writings 3) his primary concern is to explain how thinking could take place

A succession in time among ideas is thus presupposed in time-conception of a logical mind; but need this time progress by a continuous flow rather than by discrete steps?

Of course, he concludes that a “continuous time” is needed. Yet, at this point, Peirce starts to depart from a single, univoke time. He continues

Not only does it take time for an idea to grow but after that process is completed the idea cannot exist in an instant. During the time of its existence it will not be always the same but will undergo changes. […] It thus appears that as all ideas occupy time so all ideas are more or less general and indeterminate, the wider conceptions occupying longer intervals.

This way he arrives at a time conception that could be characterized as a multiplicity of continua. Even if it would be possible to determine a starting time and a time of completion for any of those intervals, it still remains that all those overlapping thoughts form a single consciousness.

Chapter 5 in “Writings 3” (MS239), titled “That the significance of thought lies in reference to the future” [35], starts in the following way.

In every logical mind there must be 1st, ideas; 2nd, general rules according to which one idea determines another, or habits of mind which connect ideas; and, 3rd, processes whereby such habitual connections are established.

The second aspect strongly reminds to our orthoregulation and the underlying “paradox of rule-following” first clearly stated by Ludwig Wittgenstein in the 1930ies [36]. The section ends with the following reasoning:

It appears then that the intellectual significance of all thought ultimately lies in its effect upon our actions. Now in what does the intellectual character of conduct consist? Clearly in its harmony to the eye of reason; that is in the fact that the mind in contemplating it shall find a harmony of purposes in it. In other words it must be capable of rational interpretation to a future thought. Thus thought is rational only so far as it recommends itself to a possible future thought. Or in other words the rationality of thought lies in its reference to a possible future.

In this brief paragraph we may find several resemblances to what we have said earlier, and elsewhere. First, Peirce’s conception of time within his semiotics provide us a means for referring to the binding problem. More precisely, thought as sign process is itself the mechanism to relate ideas and actions, where actions are always preceded, but never succeeded by their respective ideas.

Second, Peirce rejects the idea that a single purpose could be considered as reasonable. Instead, in order to justify reasonability, a whole population of remindable purposes, present and past, is required; all of them overlapping, at least potentially, all of them once pointing to the future. This multiplicity of overlapping and unmeasurable intervals creates a multiplicity of continuations. Even more important, this continuation is known before it happens. Hence, the present extends into the past as well as into the future. Given the fact that firstly the immediate effect of an action is rarely the same as the ultimate effect, and secondly the ultimate effect is often quite different to the expectation related to the purpose, we often do even not know “what” happened in the past. So, by applying ordinary referential time, our ignorance stretches to both sides of present, though not in the same way. It even exceeds the period of time of what could be called event.

Yet, by applying Peirce’s continuity, we find a possibility to simplify the description. For we then are faced by a single kind of ignorance that results in the attitude that Heidegger called “care” (Sorge).

The mentioned extension of the experienced ignorance as an ignorance within the present into the past and the future does not mean, of course, to propose a symmetry between the past and the future with respect to present, as we will see in a moment. Wittgenstein [40] is completely right in his diagnosis that

[…] in the grammar of future tense the conception of “memory” does not occur, even not with inverted sign.21 (p. 159)

The third issue, finally, concerns the way re relates rationality to the notion of “possible future.” This rationality is not claiming absolute objectivity, since it creates its own conditions as well as itself. Peirce’s rationality is a local one, at least at first sight. It is just this creating of the possible future that provides the conditions for the possibility of the experiencibility of future affairs.

The most important (methodological) feature of Peircean semiotics is, however, the possibility to jump out of consciousness, so to speak. Sign situations occur not only within the mind, they are also ubiquitous in interpersonal exchange, and even in the absorption of energy by different kinds of matter. Semiotics provides a cross-medial continuity. This argument has been extended later by John Dewey [37][38], Peirce’s pragmatist disciple .

Such we could say that, if (1) thought comprises signs, and (2) signs are sign situations, then it does not make sense to speak about “instantaneous” time regarding thought and consciousness in particular, but also regarding any interpretation in general, as interpretation is always part of a sign (-situation). Then, we also can say that presence lasts as long as a particular interpretation is “running”. Yet, signs refer to signs only. Interpretations are fundamentally open in its beginning as well as in its end. They are nested and occur in parallel, and are more broken than finished just contingently. Once the time string, or the interpretive chain, respectively, has been broken, past and future appear literally in their own right, i.e. de iure, and only by a formal act.22

The consequence of all that the probabilistic network of interpretations gives rise to a cloud of time strings, any of them with indeterminable ends. It is clear that signs and thus thinking would be absolutely impossible if there would be just one referential clock-time. But even more important, without the inner multiplicity of “sign time” there would be only the cold world of a single strictly causal process. There would be no life and no information. Only a single, frozen black hole.

Given the primacy of the cloud of time strings, it is easy to construct referential time as a clock-time. One just needs to enumerate the overlapping time strings in such a way that enumeration and counting coincide. Once this is done it is possible to refer to a clock. Yet, the clock would be without any meaning without such a enumerative counting. The clock the is suitably actualized in a more simple way by a perfectly repetitive process, that is, a process that actually is outside of time, much as Aristotle thought it is the case for celestial bodies. And once we have established clock time we can engage in interpersonal synchronization of our individual time string populations.

Peircean sign time thus not only allows to reconcile the two modi of time, the experiential time and referential time. It is also possible to extend the same process into historical time, rooting historicity in an alternative and much more appealing manner than it was proposed by Heidegger.

Wittgenstein

All the positions we met so far can be split into two sets. In the first part we find fundamental ontology and existential philosophy (Heidegger), analytic ontology (Oaklander), “folk approaches” (Augustine), idealistic conceptions (McTaggart) and physics with its reductionist perspective . In the second subset we find Aristotle, Bergson and Peirce.

The difference between the two parties lies in the way they root the concept of time. The former party roots it in reality; hence they ask about the inner structure of time, much like one would ask about the inner structure of wood. For the proponents of the second class time is primary experiential time and such always rooted in the interpretant, i.e. some kind of active observer, whether this refers to observers with or without consciousness. For all of them, though in different ways, the present is primary. For Aristotle it is kind of a substance, for Bergson durée, for Peirce the sign as process.

Wittgenstein does not say much about time, since he seems to be convinced that there is not so much to say. He simply accepts the distinction between referential time of physics and experiential time and considers them to be incommensurable. [39]

Both ways of expressing it are okay and equitable, yet not blendable.23 ([40], p.81-82)

Already in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein wrote

We cannot compare any process with the “passage of time”—there is no such thing—but only with another process (say, with the movement of the chronometer).24 (TLP 6.3611)

Here it becomes clear that clock-time is nothing “built into matter”, but rather a communally negotiated reference, or in short, referential time. We all refer to the same particular process, whether this is length of a day or the number of state changes in Cs-133.25 Experiential time, on the other hand, can’t be considered as a geometrical entity, hence there is no such thing as a “point” in present. In experience, there is nothing to measure. The main reason for this being that experience is tightly linked to (abstract) modeling, and thus to the choreosteme. In short, experience is a self-generating process without an Archimedean Point.

“Now” does not denote a point in time. It is not a “name of a moment in time.”26 ([43], 157)

[…] yet it is nonsense to say ‚This is this‘, or ‚This is now‘.27 ([43], 159)

„Now“ is an indexical term, just as „I“, „this“ or „here“. Indexical terms do not refer to an index. Quite in contrast, sometimes, in more simple cases, they are setting an index, in more complicated cases indexical terms just denote the possibility for imposing an index onto a largely indeterminate context. Hence, it is for grammatical reasons that we can’t say “this is now.” Time is not an object. Time is nothing of which we could say that it does exist. Thus we also can not ask “What is time?” as this implies the existentialist perspective. The question about the reality of time is ungrammatical, it is like trying to play Chinese checkers28 on a chess board, or chess on a soccer field.

More precisely, there is no possibility to speak about “time as an object” in meaningful terms. For language is (i) a process itself, (ii) a process that intrinsically relates to the communal (there is no private language), and (iii) language is a strongly singular term. Thus we can conclude that there is no such thing as the objectification of time, or objective time.

Examples for such an objectification are easy to find. For instance, it is included in the question posed by Augustine “What is time?”  (Wittgenstein’s starting point for the Philosophical Investigations.) It is also included in the misunderstanding of an objective referential time. Or in the claim that time itself is flowing (like a river). Or in the attempt to proof that time itself is continuous.29

Instead, “now” is used as an indication of—or a pointer to—the present and the presence of the speaker. Its duration in terms of clock-time is irrelevant. It would be nonsense to attempt to measure this duration, because it would mean to measure the speaker and his act itself.

Accordingly, the temporal modi in language, the tenses, such as past, present time, future, reflect to the temporal modi of actions—including speech acts—, which take place in the “now” and are anchored in the future through their purpose ([42] p.142).

Confusing and mixing the two conceptions of time—referential time and experiential time—is the main reason, according to Wittgenstein, for enigmas and paradoxes regarding time (such as the distinction of A-series and B-series by McTaggart and in ontology).

For there is no such thing as the objectification of time, time is intrinsically a relational “entity”. As Deleuze brilliantly demonstrates in his reflections about Bergson [33], time can be thought only as durée, or in my words, as a manifold of anobjected time strings, that directly points to the virtual, which in turn is not isolated, but rather an intensity within the choreosteme.

The idealistic, phenomenological and existential approaches to temporality are deeply flawed, because it is not possible to take time apart, or to take time out of the game. Wittgenstein considers such attempts as a misuse of language. Expressions like „time itself“ or questions like “What is time?” are outside of any possible language.

In the ‘Philosophical Remarks’ he says

What belongs to the essence of the world could not be expressed by language. Only what we could imagine as being different language is able to tell.30 ([40] p.84).

Everything which we are able to describe at all, could also be different.31 ([45],p .173).

In order to play the game of “questioning reality of X” in a meaningful manner it has to be possible that it is not real, or partially. An alternative is needed, which however is missing in existential questions or attempts to find the essence. Thus it is meaningless (free of sense) to doubt (even implicitly) the reality of time, whether as present, as past or as future. It is similar to Moore’s paradox of doubting of having an arm. In the end, at least after Wittgenstein, one always have to begin with language. It is nonsense to begin with existence, or likewise essence.

Wittgenstein rejects the traditional philosophical reflection that always tried to find the eternal, necessary and general truth, essence or “true nature” as opposed to empirical—and pragmatical—impressions. The attempt to determine the reality of X as a being-X-as-such is a misuse of language, it is outside of the logic of language.

For Wittgenstein, the more interesting part of time points to memory, as clock-time is a mere convention. For him, memory is the sourcing wellspring (“Quelle”) of time, since the past is experienceable just as a recall of the past ([40] p.81f). Bergson called it recollection.

I think that there are one major consequence of Wittgenstein’s considerations. Time can be comprehended only as a transcendent structural condition of establishing a relation, hence also acting, speaking and thinking. Without such conditioning it is simply not possible to establish a relation. This extends, of course, also to the realm of the social [46]. Here we could even point to physics, particularly to the maximum speed of light, that is the maximum speed of exchanging information, which translates to the “establishment of time” as soon as a relation has been built. This includes that this building of a relation is irreversible. Within reversibility it does not make sense to speak about time. Even shorter, we could be tempted to say that within information there is no time, if it would be meaningful to think something like “within information”. Information itself is strictly bound to interpretation, which brings us back to Peircean semiotics.

Such we could say that we as humans “create” time mainly by means of language, albeit it is not the only possibility to “create” time. Yet, for us humans (as a collective individual beings32) there is hardly another possibility, for we can’t step out of language. Different languages and different uses of language “create” different times. It is this what Helga Nowotny calls “Eigenzeit” [46] (“self-owned time”).

It is rather important to understand that by means of these argument we don’t refer any more to something like “historical time” or “natural time”. Our argument is much more general.

Secondarily, then, we may conclude that we have to ask about the different ways we use the language game “time”.

Ricoeur

As other authors Paul Ricoeur proposes a strict discontinuity between historical time (“historicality”) and physical time. The former he also calls “time with present”, the latter “time without present.” Yet, unlike other authors he also proposes that this discontinuity can’t be reconciled or bridged. This hypothesis he proceeds to formulate by means of three aporias [47].

• – Aporia 1, duality: Subjective time and objective time can’t be thought together in a single conception, and even more, they obscure them mutually.
• – Aporia 2, false unity: Despite we take it for granted that there is one single time, we can’t justify it. We even contradict the insight—which appears as trivial—that there is subjective and objective time.
• – Aporia 3, inscrutability: Thought can not comprehend time, since its origin can’t be grasped. Conceptually, time is ineluctable. Whenever philosophical thought starts to think about time, this thinking is already too late.

Ricoeur is the second author in our selection who takes a phenomenological stance. Heidegger’s “Being and Time” serves as his point of reference. Yet, Ricoeur is neither interested in the analysis of Being nor of the having-Been. The topic to which he refers in Heidegger, and at the same time his vantage point, is historicality, which he approaches in a very different manner. For Ricoeur, history and historicality can not only be understood just through narrativity; there is even a mutual structural determination. Experience of time as the source of historicality as well as the soil of it gets refigurated through narration. In the essay “On Narrative” [49] that he published while his major work “Time and Narration” [48] was in the making we can find his main hypothesis:

My […] working hypothesis is that narrativity and temporality are closely related—as closely as, in Wittgenstein’s terms, a language game and a form of life. Indeed, I take temporality to be that structure of existence that reaches language in narrativity and narrativity to be the language structure that has temporality as its ultimate referent. Their relationship is therefore reciprocal. (p.169)

Concerning narrativity, Ricoeur draws a lot, of course, on the structure of language and the structure of stories. On both levels various degrees of temporality and nonchronological proportions appear. On the level of language, we find short-range and long-range indicators of temporality, beyond mere grammar. Long-range indicators such as “while” or adverbs of time (“earlier”) do not have a clear boundary, neither structurally nor semantically. The same can be found on the level of the story, the plot as Ricoeur calls it. Here he distinguishes a episodic from a configurational dimension, the former presupposing ordinary, i.e. referential time. Taking into account that

To tell and to follow a story is already to reflect upon events in order to encompass them in successive wholes. (p.178)

it follows that any story comprises a

[…] twofold characteristic of confronting and combining both sequence and pattern in various ways.

In other words, a story creates a multiplicity of possible sequences and times, thereby opening a multiplicity of “planes of manifestation,” or in other words, a web of metaphors33.

[…] the narrative function provides a transition from within-time-ness to historicality.

Yet, according to Ricoeur the configurational dimension of the story has a particular effect on the ordinary temporality of a story as it is transported by the episodics. Through the triggered reflective act, the whole story may condense into a single “thought”.

Finally, the recollection of the story governed as a whole by its way of ending constitutes an alternative to the representation of time as moving from the past forward into the future, according to the well-known metaphor of the arrow of time. It is as though recollection inverted the so-called natural order of time. […] A story is made out of events to the extent that plot makes events into a story. The plot, therefore, places us at the crossing point of temporality and narrativity.

This single thought, the plot of a story as whole now is confronted particularly with the third aporia of inscrutability. Basically, for Ricoeur “not really thinking time” when thinking about time is aporetic. (fTR III 467/dZE III, 417) The aporia

[…] emerges right in that moment, where time, which eludes any attempt to be constituted, turns out to be associated to a constitutive order, which in turn always and already is assumed by the work of that constitution.

Any conception that we could propose about time is confronted with the impossibility of integrating this reflexively ineluctable reason. We never can subject time as an object of our reflexions completely. Inga Römer emphasizes (p.284)

Yet, and this is a crucial point for Ricoeur, “what is brought to its failure here is not thinking, in all its meanings, but rather the drive, better the hubris that our thinking seduces to attempt to dominate sense”. For this failure is only a relative one, the inscrutability is not faced with a lapse into silence, but rather with a polymorphy of arrangements and valuations.34

The items of this polymorphy are incommensurable for Ricoeur. Now, for Ricoeur this polymorphy of time experience is situated in a constitutive and reciprocal relationship with narrativity (see his main hypothesis in “On Narrative” that we cited above). Thereby, our experience of time refigurates and reconfigurates itself continuously. In other words, narration represents a practical and poetic mediation of heterogeneous experiences of time. This interplay, so Ricoeur, can overcome the limitations of philosophical inquiries of time.

Interestingly, Ricoeur rejects any systematicity of his arguments, as Römer points out: (p.454)

This association of withdrawal of grounds at the one hand and the challenge for a thinking-more and thinking-different is the strongest argument for Ricoeur’s explicit refusal of a system regarding the three aporias of time as well as their narrative answers.35 (p.454)

The result of this is pretty clear. The Ricoeurean aporetics starts to molt itself into a narration, constantly staggering and oscillating between its claiming, its negation, its negative positivity and its positive negativity, beginning to dazzle and getting incomprehensible.

Temporality tends to get completely merged in narrativity, which in turn becomes synonymous with the experience of time. Such, there are only two possibilities for Ricoeur, neither of which he actually did follow. The first is the denial of temporality that could be thought independent of narration. The second would be that life is equated with narration.

I think, Ricoeur would favour the second alternative. As Römer summarizes:

Historical practice allows us to mediate experienced time with linear time in its own creation, the historical time.36 (p.326)

Such, however, Ricoeur would introduce a secondary re-mystification, which actually is even an autolog one, since Ricoeur has been starting with it as an inscrutability. At this point, all his arguments vanish and turn into a simple pointing to experience.

In the end, the notion of historical practice remains rather questionable. Ricoeur uses the concepts of witness or testimony as well as “trace,” which of course reminds to Derrida’s infamous trace: an uninterpretable remnant of history. Despite Ricoeur emphasizes the importance of the reader as the situs of the completion of text, he never seems to accept interpretation as a primacy. Here, he closely follows the inherited phenomenological misconceptions of the object that exists independent from and outside of the subject. Other difficulties of it is the denial of transcendence and abstraction, which together with its logicism causes the wrong problem of freedom. Phenomenology never understood, whether in Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida, Ricoeur or analytic philosophy, that comparing things can’t take place on the same level as the compared things. Even the most simple comparison implies the Differential, requiring a considerable amount of constructive activity.

Outside phenomenology, Ricoeur’s attempt is only little convincing, albeit he describes many interesting observations around narration and texts. His aporetics of time appears half-baked, through and through, so to speak. Poisoned by phenomenology, and strangely enough forgetting about language in the formulation of his aporias, he commits almost all of the possible mistakes already in his premises. He objectifies time and he treats it as an existential, which could be explained. After all, his main objection that we “can’t really think time”, does not hit a unique. case. Any thinking of any concept is unable to “really think it.”

Our conclusion is not a rejection of Ricoeur’s basic idea of a mutual relationship between “thinking time” and narration. Yet, obviously thinking about narration and phenomenology is an impossibility itself.

One of interesting observations around narration is the distinction between the episodic and the configurational dimension of a plot. This introduces multiplicity, reversibility, and extended present as well as an additional organizational layer. Yet, Ricoeur failed to step out of his affections with narration in order to get aware of the opportunities attached to it.

Kant

Introducing transcendence into our game, we have to refer to Kant, of course, and his conception of time in his “Transzendentale Ästhetik der Kritik der reinen Vernunft”. Kant’s merit is the emancipation of transcendental thinking from the imagined divinity, albeit he did not push this move far enough.

By no means Kant demonstrated the irreality of time, as Einstein as well as McTaggard boldly claim. Kant just demonstrated that time can’t “have” a reality independent from a subject. Accordingly, the idea of an illusionary or irreal time itself is based on a fiction: the fiction of naïve realism. It claims that there is the possibility of an access to “nature” in a way that is independent of subject. Conversely, this does not mean that time as a reality is constructed by human thinking, of course.

The reason for misunderstanding Kant lies in the fact that Kant still argues completely within the realm of the human, while physicists like Einstein talk about the fiction of primarily unrelated entities. It is a major methodological element of the theoretic constitution of physics to assume so, in order to become able, so the fiction, to describe the relations then objectively. Well, actually this does not make much sense, yet physicists usually believe in it.

Far from showing that time is illusionary, Kant tried to secure the objectivity of time under conditions of empirical constitutions, that is, after the explicit and final departure from still scholastic pre-established harmonies that are guaranteed by God. In order to accomplish that he had to invent kind of an intrinsic transcendentality of empirical arrangements. This common basis he found in the transcendent sensual intuition.

For Kant time is a form of intuition (Anschauung), or more precisely, a transcendental and insofar pure form of sensual intuition. It is however of utmost importance, as Mike Sandbothe writes, that Kant himself relativized the universality that is introduced by the transcendentality of time, or in still other words, the intuition of the transcendental subject.

[…] die Form der Anschauung bloss Mannigfaltiges, die formale Anschauung aber Einheit der Vorstellung gibt.” ([47]p.154, B 160f)

The formal account in the intuition now refers to the use of symbols. Thus, it can’t be covered completely as a subject by the pure reason. Here, we find a possible transition to Wittgenstein, since symbols are symbols by convention. Note that this does not refer to a particular symbol, of course, but to the symbolicity that accompanies any instance of talking about time. On the one hand this points towards the element of historicity, which has been developed by Heidegger in a rather limited manner (because he restricted history to the realm of the Dasein, i.e. consciousness).

On the other hand, however, we could extend Kant’s insight of a two-fold constitution of time into more abstract, and this means a-human regions. In a condensed way Kant shows that we need sensual intuitions and symbolicity in order to access temporal aspects of the world. Sensual intuitions, then, require, in the widest sense, kind of match between sensed and the sensing. In human thinking these are the schemata, in particle physics it is the filter built deeply into matter. We could call this transverse excitability. In physics, it is called quantum.

Yet, the important thing is the symbolicity. We can immediately translate this into quantificability and quantitability. And again we are back at Aristotle’s conception.

2. Synopsis

So, after having visited some of the most important contributions to the issue of time we may try to approach a synopsis of those. Again, we have to emphasize that we disregarded many highly interesting ideas, among others those of Platon in his Timaios with his three “transcendental” categories of Being, Space and Becoming, or those of Schelling (cf. in [31]); or those of Deleuze in his cinema books, where he distinguished the “movement image” (presupposing clock time) from the “time image” that is able to provide a grip onto “time itself,” which, for Deleuze, is the virtual to which Bergson’s durée points to; likewise, any of the works by the authors we referred to should have been discussed in much more detail in order to do justice to them. Anyway.

Our intermediate goal was to liberate time from its human influences without sacrificing the applicability of the respective conception to the realm of the human. We need to do so in order to investigate the relation between time and architecture. This liberation, however, still has to obey to the insight of Wittgenstein that we must not expect to find an “essence” of time. Taking all the aspects together, we indeed may ask, as careful as possible,

How should we conceive of time?

The answer is pretty clear, yet, it comes as a compound consisting of three parts. And above all it is also pretty simple.

(1) Time is best conceived as a transcendent condition for the possibility of establishing a relation.

This “transcendent condition” is not possible without a respective plane of immanence, which in turn comprises the unfolding of virtuality. Much could be said about that, of course, with respect to the philosophical implications, its choreostemic references, or its architectonic vicinity. For instance, this determination of time suggests a close relationship to the issue of information and its correlate, causality. Or we could approach other conceptions of time by means of something like a “reverse synthesis.”

It is perhaps at least indicated to emphasize—particularly for all those that are addicted to some kind of science—that this transcendent condition does not, by no means, exclude any consideration of “natural” systems, even not in its material(ist) contraction. On the other hand, this in turn does not mean, of course, that we are doing “Naturphilosophie” here, neither of the ancient nor the scholastic type.

It is clear that we need to instantiate the subjects of this conception in order to achieve a practical relevance of it. It is in this instantiation that different forms of temporality appear, i.e. durée on the one hand and clock-time on the other. Nothing could be less surprising, now, as an incompatibility of the two forms of temporality. Actually, the expectation of a compatibility is already based on the misunderstanding that claims the possibility of a “direct” comparison (which is an illusion). Quite to the contrast, we have to understand that the phenomenal incommensurability just points to a differential of time, which we formulated as a transcendent condition above.

Now, one of the instantiations, clock-time, or referential time, is pretty trivial. We don’t need to deal with it any further. The other branch, where we find Peirce and Bergson, is more interesting.

As we have seen in our discussion about their works, multiplicity is an essential ingredient of relational time. Peirce and Bergson arrived at it on different ways, though. For Peirce it is a consequence of the multiplicity of thoughts about something, naturally derived from his semiotics. For Bergson, it is a multiplicity within experience, or better the experiencing consciousness. So to speak, they take inverse positions regarding the mediality. We already said that we prefer the Peircean perspective due to its more prominent potential for generalization. Yet, I think the two perspectives could be reconciled quite easily. Both conceptions conceive primal time as “experiential” time (in the widest sense).

Our instantiation of time as a transcendent condition is thus:

(2) Transcendent time gets instantiated as a probabilistic, distributed and manifold multiplicity of—topologically spoken—open time strings.

Each time string represents a single and local present, where “local” does not refer to a “spatial place”, but rather to a particular sign process.

This multiplicity is not an external multiplicity, despite it is triggered or filled from the external. It is also not possible to “count” the items in it, without loosing present. If we count, we destroy the coherence between the overlapping strings of present, thus creating countable referential time. This highlights a further step of instantiation, the construction of expressibility.

(3) The pre-specific multiplicity of time strings decoheres by symbolization into a specific space of expressibility.

Symbolization may be actualized by means of numbers, as already mentioned before. This would allow us to comprehend and speak of movement. We also have seen that we could construct a web of proceeding metaphors and their virtual movement. This would put us in midst the narration and into metaphoricology, as I call it, which refers to the perspective that conceives of being human and of human beings as parts of lively metaphors. In other words, culture itself becomes the story and the narrative.

As still another possibility we could address the construction of a space of expressibility of temporality quite directly. Such a space need to be an aspectional space, of course. Just keep in mind that the aspectional space is not a space of quantities, as it is the case for a Cartesian space. The aspectional space is a space that is characterized by a “smooth” blending of intensity and quantity. We may call it intensive quantities, or quantitable intensities. It is a far-reaching generalization of the “ordinary” space conceptions that we know from mathematics. As the aspects —the replacement of dimensions—of that space we could choose the modes of temporality—such as past, present, future—, the durée, the referential time, or implicit time as it occurs and shows up in behavior or choreostemic space. We also could think of an aspection that is built by a Riemannian manifold, allowing to comprise linearity and circularity as just a single aspect.

The tremendous advantage of such a space is manifold, of course, because an infinite amount of particular time practices can be constructed, even as a continuum. This contiguous and continuous plurality is of a completely different kind as the unmediatable items in the plurality of time conceptions that has been proposed by Mike Sandbothe [8].

The aspectional space of transcendent time offers, I mentioned it, the possibility for expressing time, or more precisely, a particular image of time. There are several of those spaces, and each of them is capable to hold an infinite number of different images of time.

It is now easy to understand that collapsing the conditions for building relations with the instantiation into a concrete time form, or even with the action (or the “phenomenon”) results in nothing else than a terrible mess. Actually, it is precisely the mess that physicists or phenomenology create in different ways. “Phenomenal” observables of this mess are pseudo-paradoxes or dualities. We also could say that such mess is created due to a wrong application of the grammar of time.

There is one important aspect of time and temporality, or perspective onto them, that we mentioned only marginally so far, the event. We met it in Heidegger’s “Being and Time” as the provider [m: the Giving] and insofar also the origin of Being and time. We also saw that Ricoeur uses them as building bricks for stories that combine them into successive wholes. For Dewey (“Time and Individuality”, “Context of Thought”) the concept of an event involves both the individual pattern of growth and the environmental conditions. Dewey, as Ricoeur, emphasizes that there is no geometrical sequence, no strict seriality to which events could be arranged. Dewey calls it concurrence, which could not be separated from occurrence of an event.

Yet, for both of them time remains something external to the conception of event, while Heidegger conceives it as the source of time. Considering our conception of time as a proceeding actualization of Differential Time we could say the the concept of event relates to the actualization of the relation within the transcendence of its conditions. Such it could be said to accompany creation of time, integrating transcendent and practical conditions as well as all the more or less contingent choices associated with it. In some way we can see that we have proceduralized (differentiated) Heidegger’s “point of origin”.37. Marc Rölli [52] sharpens this point by referring to Deleuze’s conception as “radically empiricist”, dismissing Heidegger through the concepts of actuality and virtuality. Such we can see that the immediate condition that is embedding the possibility of experience is the “event,” which in turn can be traced back to a proper image of time. Time, as a condition, is mediated towards experience by the event, as a condition. Certainly, however, the “event” could not be thought without an explicitly formulated conception of time. Without it, a multitude of misunderstandings must be expected. If we accept the perspective that insofar time is preceding substance, which resolves of course into a multiplicity in a Deleuzean perspective, we also could say that the trinity of time, event and experience contributes to the foil of immanence, or even builds it up, where experience in turn refers to the choreostemic constitution of being in the world.

In order to summarize our conception as an overview… here is how we propose to conceive of time

• (1) Time is a transcendent condition for the possibility of establishing a relation, or likewise a quality.
• (2) It gets instantiated as a probabilistic multiplicity of open time strings that, by the completion of all instantiations, present presence.
• (3) The pre-specific multiplicity of time strings decoheres by symbolization into a specific, aspectional space of expressibility.
• (4) Any particular “choice” of a situs in this space of intensive quantities represents the respective image of time, which then may emerge in worldly actualizations.

Particularly regarding this last element we have to avoid the misunderstanding of a seriality of the kind “I choose then I get”. This choice is an implicit one, just as the other instantiations, and can be “observed” only in hindsight, or more precise, they show themselves only within performance. Only in this way we can say that it brings time into a particular Lebenswelt and its contexts as a matter (or subject) of design.

Nevertheless, we now could formulate kind of a recipe for creating a particular “time”, form of temporality, or “time quality.” This would work also in the reverse direction, of course. It is possible to construct a comparative of time qualities across authors, architects or urban neighborhoods. Hopefully, this will help to improve urban practices. In order to make this creational aspect more clear, we now have to investigate the possibilities to create time “itself”.

to be continued …

(The next part will deal with the question whether it could be possible to identify the mechanisms needed to create time…)

Notes

1. “Living City” was Archigram’s first presentation to the public, which has been curated by Ron Herron in 1963. 

2. German orig.: „Zuletzt markiert die Zeit für Ricoeur das “Mysterium” unseres Denkens, das sich der Repräsentation verweigert, indem es unser Dasein auf eine für das Denken uneinholbare Weise umgreift.“

3. As in the preceding essays, we use the capital “U” if we refer to the urban as a particular quality and as a concept in the vicinity of Urban Reason, in order to distinguish it from the ordinary adjective that refers to common sense understanding.

4. remark about state and development.

5. We discussed them in the essay about growth patterns. The fractal is a consequence of self-affine mapping, roughly spoken, a local replacement by a minor version of the original diagram.

6. It is tempting to relate this position to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Yet, we won’t deal with contemporary physics here, even as it would be interesting to investigate the deficiencies of physical conceptions of time.

7. McTaggart paper about time that has been cited over and over again and became unfortunately very influential. Yet, it is nothing but a myth. For a refutation see Tegtmeier [18]. For reasons of its own stupidity and the boldly presented misinterpretation of the work of Kant, McTaggart’s writing deserves the title of a “most developed philanosy” (Grk: anoysia ανοησία, nonsense, or anosia, immunity). It is not even worthwhile, as we will see later through our discussion of Wittgenstein’s work regarding time, to consider it seriously, as for instance Sean Power does .

8. There is a distant resemblance to Georg Berkley’s “esse est percipi.” [20] Yet, in contrast to Berkley, we conceive of interpretation as an activity that additionally is deeply rooted in the communal.

9. German original: SZ: 326: „Zukünftig auf sich zurückkommend, bringt sich die Entschlossenheit gegenwärtigend in die Situation. Die Gewesenheit entspringt der Zukunft, so zwar, dass die gewesene (besser gewesende) Zukunft die Gegenwart aus sich entlässt. Dies dergestalt als gewesend-gegenwärtigende Zukunft einheitliche Phänomen nennen wir die Zeitlichkeit.“

10. One has to consider that Heidegger conceives of Being only in relation to the Being-there (“Dasein”), while the “Being-there” is confined to conscious beings.

11. The translators used ”falling”, which however does not match the German “verfallend”. (Actually, I consider it as a mistake.) Hence, I replaced it by a more appropriate verb.

12. Note that Heidegger always used to write in a highly ambigue fashion, which makes it nearly impossible to translate him literally from German to English. In everyday language “Es gibt” is surely well translated by “There is.” Yet, in this text he repeatedly refers to “giving”. Turning perspective to “giving” opens the preceding “Es” away from its being as impersonate corpuscle towards impersonal “fateness”. This interpretation matches the presentation of the affair in [24].

13. German original: “Das Sein eigens denken, verlangt, das Sein als den Grund des Seienden fahren zu lassen zugunsten des im Entbergen verborgen spielenden Gebens, d.h. des „Es gibt“.“

14. see also: Marcel Mauss, Die Gabe. Form und Funktion des Austauschs in archaischen Gesellschaften. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 2009 [1925].

15. German orig.: „In “Zeit und Sein” schliesslich sieht Heidegger den Ursprung der Zeit im Ereignis, welches er ausdrücklich als den [sich ] selbst entzogenen Geber von Sein und Zeit bestimmt. Das Ereignis, von Heidegger andernorts bestimmt als singulare tantum, ist selbst grundsätzlich entzogen – und dennoch ist das Ereignis der Ursprung der Zeit.“

16. German original (my own translation): “Sein und Zeit ist vielmehr dahin unterwegs, auf dem Wege über die Zeitlichkeit des Daseins in der Interpretation des Seins als Temporalität einen Zeitbegriff, jenes Eigene der “Zeit” zu finden, von woher sich “Sein” als Anwesen er-gibt. Damit ist aber gesagt, daß das in der Fundamentalontologie gemeinte Fundamentale kein Aufbauen darauf verträgt. Stattdessen sollte, nachdem der Sinn von Sein erhellt worden wäre, die ganze Analytik des Daseins ursprünglicher und in ganz anderer Weise wiederholt werden.“ [21]

17. German original (my translation): “Zeit-Raum nennt jetzt das Offene, das im Einander-sich-reichen von Ankunft, Gewesenheit und Gegenwart sich lichtet. Erst dieses Offene und nur es räumt dem uns gewöhnlich bekannten Raum seine mögliche Ausbreitung ein.“

18. This also holds for any of the attempts hat can be found in physics. The following sources may be considered as the most prominent sources, though they are not undisputed: Carroll [22], Price [23][24], Penrose [25]. Physics always and inevitably conceives of time as a measurable “thing”, i.e. as something which already has been negotiated in its relevance for the communal aspects of thinking. See Aristotle’s conception of time.

19. hint to Schelling, for whom intensity is not accessible at all, but could be conceived only as a force that expands into extensity.

20. You will find Peirce’s writings online here: http://www.cspeirce.com/; the parts reference here for instance at http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/bycsp/logic/ms237.htm,

21. German original (my transl.): „Denn in der Grammatik der Zukunft tritt der Begriff des ,Gedächtnis’ nicht auf, auch nicht mit umgekehrten Vorzeichen.“

22. In meditational practices one can extend the interpretive chain in various ways. The result is simply the stopping of referential time.

23. German orig.: „Beide Ausdrucksweisen sind in Ordnung und gleichberechtigt, aber nicht miteinander vermischbar“.

24. German orig.: „Wir können keinen Vorgang mit dem ,Ablauf der Zeit’ vergleichen – diesen gibt es nicht – sondern nur mit einem anderen Vorgang (etwa mit dem Gang des Chronometers).“ translation taken from here.

25. 1 second is currently defined as the duration of 9192631770 transitions between two energy levels of the caesium-133 atom. [39] Interestingly, this fits nicely to Aristotle’s conception of time. The reason to take the properties of Cs-133 as a reference is generality. The better the resolution of the referential scale the more general it could be applied.

26. German orig.: „„Jetzt“ bezeichnet keinen Zeitpunkt. Es ist kein „Name eines Zeitmomentes“.“

27. German orig.: „[…] es ist aber Unsinn zu sagen ‘Dies ist dies’, oder ‘Dies ist jetzt’.“

28. In German “Halma”.

29. Much could be said about physics here, regarding the struggling of physicists to “explain” the so-called arrow of time, or regarding the theory of relativity or quantum physics with its Planck time, but it is not close enough to our interests here. Physics always tries to objectify time, which happens through claiming an universally applicable scale, hence they run into paradoxes. In other terms, the fact of the necessity of conceptions like Planck time, or time dilatation, is precisely that without observer there is nothing. The mere possibility of observation (and the observer) vanishes at the light of speed, or at the singularity “within” black holes”. In some way, physics all the time (tries to) proof(s) their own nonsensical foundations.

30. German orig.: „Was zum Wesen der Welt gehört, kann die Sprache nicht ausdrücken. (…) Nur was wir uns auch anders vorstellen können, kann die Sprache sagen.”

31. German orig.: ,,Alles was wir überhaupt beschreiben können, könnte auch anders sein”.

32. Note that in case of a city we meet somewhat the inverse of it. We could conceive of a city as “an individual being made from a collective.”

33. see also Paul Ricoeur (1978), “The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling,” Critical Inquiry, 1978.

34. German orig.: „Aber, und das ist für Ricoeur entscheidend, “was hier zum Scheitern gebracht wird, ist nicht das Denken, in allen Bedeutungen des Wortes, sondern der Trieb, besser die hybris, die unser Denken dazu verleitet, sich zu Herrn des Sinns zu machen“. Aufgrund dieses nur relativen Scheiterns stehe der Unerforschlichkeit kein Verstummen, sondern vielmehr eine Polymorphie der Gestaltungen und Bewertungen der Zeit gegenüber.“

35. German orig.: „Diese Zusammengehörigkeit von Entzug des Grundes und Herausforderung um Mehr- und Andersdenken ist der stärkste Grund für Ricoeurs explizite Ablehnung eines Systems sowohl der drei Aporien der Zeit selbst wie auch ihrer narrativen Antworten.“

36. German orig.: „Historische Praxis erlaubt uns, die erlebt Zeit mit der linearen Zeit in einer ihr eigenen Schöpfung, der historischen Zeit, zu vermitteln.“

37. Much more would be to say about the event, of course (cf. [51]). Yet, I think that our characterization not only encompasses most conceptions or fits to most of the contribution to the “philosophy of the event,” it also clarifies and sheds light (kind of x-rays?) on them.

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