1 hour ago
(This post was last modified: 25 minutes ago by Magical Realist.)
I'm now convinced that we largely have a mistaken and culturally-ingrained view of what time really is. Conventionally it is seen as a succession, or a before and after, a metric, or a movement along a pre-existent "timeline", invoking all the metaphors of being a body always engaged in being in space. The "places" of the past and future, between which sits the infinitesimally thin slice of the present. How shall re-interrogate the primal phenomenal nature of time as it occurs to us? Well here's a good start:
"Despatializing time refers to the conceptual, philosophical, or technological effort to separate our understanding of time from the metaphors, constraints, and measurements of physical space.
In human cognition, language, and classical physics, time is almost always "spatialized." We treat it like a line we move along, a landscape we look back on (the past), or a territory ahead (the future). Despatializing time means breaking away from these spatial frameworks to understand time in its purest, most intrinsic form.
Here is a breakdown of how the concept applies across different fields:
1. In Philosophy (The Bergsonian View)
The French philosopher Henri Bergson was the primary champion of this idea. He argued that human beings have a bad habit of treating time like space.
• The Critique of Spatialized Time: Bergson argued that when we view time as a sequence of discrete moments ticking away on a clock face (or as points on a timeline), we are turning time into a line. This makes time divisible, static, and measurable—just like space.
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• Pure Duration (Durée): To despatialize time, Bergson argued we must experience it as duration. True time is a continuous, indivisible, and qualitative flow. It cannot be chopped up into static intervals without losing its essence. Think of a melody: if you chop it into individual notes, the "music" disappears; it only exists in the continuous flow.".
While I do like the metaphor of the flow, like how music happens to us as one qualitatively rich transition, it seems to me to still rely on a pre-spatialized acquaintance with flowing streams or the wind or even energy itself. Which again suggests the movement of a fluid thru some sort of static conduitive space. The necessarily pre-conceived before and after and uni-directionality of the current itself. If otoh we just content ourselves with the property of just happening, then we get a better sense of how time manifests. Things happening out in the world, and things happening to us as our own experience.
I also like the metaphor of appearing and disappearing, which links up time with the phenomenal experience of our own waking up out of our eternal state of somnolescence. "Styles of appearing" as I heard from one website--from the sudden and jolting to gradual and soothing to transforming and magical. Time just as this ongoing transpiring of everything--pure duration or qualitatively-felt change as Bergson suggests.
Think how we experience the illusion of a movie or cartoon as exactly this state of things just happening, not from any place or towards any place as if some spatial movement imposed on static images (though that is exactly what's physically going on) but as arising organically from the story/world of the movie itself, indistinguishable from what happens and how it happens and why it happens and who it is happening to. Endemic time, not an empty abstraction added-on to everything already being, but as intrinsic to the very nature and possibilities of whatever presences where it presences.
"Despatializing time refers to the conceptual, philosophical, or technological effort to separate our understanding of time from the metaphors, constraints, and measurements of physical space.
In human cognition, language, and classical physics, time is almost always "spatialized." We treat it like a line we move along, a landscape we look back on (the past), or a territory ahead (the future). Despatializing time means breaking away from these spatial frameworks to understand time in its purest, most intrinsic form.
Here is a breakdown of how the concept applies across different fields:
1. In Philosophy (The Bergsonian View)
The French philosopher Henri Bergson was the primary champion of this idea. He argued that human beings have a bad habit of treating time like space.
• The Critique of Spatialized Time: Bergson argued that when we view time as a sequence of discrete moments ticking away on a clock face (or as points on a timeline), we are turning time into a line. This makes time divisible, static, and measurable—just like space.
\
• Pure Duration (Durée): To despatialize time, Bergson argued we must experience it as duration. True time is a continuous, indivisible, and qualitative flow. It cannot be chopped up into static intervals without losing its essence. Think of a melody: if you chop it into individual notes, the "music" disappears; it only exists in the continuous flow.".
While I do like the metaphor of the flow, like how music happens to us as one qualitatively rich transition, it seems to me to still rely on a pre-spatialized acquaintance with flowing streams or the wind or even energy itself. Which again suggests the movement of a fluid thru some sort of static conduitive space. The necessarily pre-conceived before and after and uni-directionality of the current itself. If otoh we just content ourselves with the property of just happening, then we get a better sense of how time manifests. Things happening out in the world, and things happening to us as our own experience.
I also like the metaphor of appearing and disappearing, which links up time with the phenomenal experience of our own waking up out of our eternal state of somnolescence. "Styles of appearing" as I heard from one website--from the sudden and jolting to gradual and soothing to transforming and magical. Time just as this ongoing transpiring of everything--pure duration or qualitatively-felt change as Bergson suggests.
Think how we experience the illusion of a movie or cartoon as exactly this state of things just happening, not from any place or towards any place as if some spatial movement imposed on static images (though that is exactly what's physically going on) but as arising organically from the story/world of the movie itself, indistinguishable from what happens and how it happens and why it happens and who it is happening to. Endemic time, not an empty abstraction added-on to everything already being, but as intrinsic to the very nature and possibilities of whatever presences where it presences.