Let's just bring forth (to analyze later sometime) four ways of conceiving time, in four definitive statements by four authors:
Heidegger says:
Primordal and authentic temporality temporalizes itself in terms of the authentic future and in such a way that in having been futurally, it first of all awakens the present [as making-present or presence].
-Being and Time, II.3.¶65, p.378
And Hegel says:
Now, in actuality, the substance that knows exists earlier than its form or its Notion-determined "shape"... In the Notion that knows itself as Notion, the moments thus appear earlier than the fulfilled whole whose coming-to-be is the movement of those moments. In consciousness, on the other hand, the whole, though uncomprehended, is prior to the moments. Time is the Notion itself that is there and which presents itself to consciousness as empty intuition.
-Phenomenology of Spirit, §801, p. 486-487.
These are the two most important for any explication we might later attempt. But there are two more we should note and perhaps also use.
Nietzsche says:
A certain emperor always bore in mind the transitoriness of all things so as not to take them too seriously and to live at peace among them. To me, on the contrary, everything seems far too valuable to be so fleeting: I seek an eternity for everything: ought one to pour the most precious salves and wines into the sea?--My consolation is that everything that has been is eternal: the sea will cast it up again.
-The Will to Power, #1065 (Nov. 1887-March 1888), p. 547-8
And, finally, Kant says:
The concept of change, and with it the concept of motion, as change of place, is possible only though and in the representation of time; ...if this representation were not an intuition (internal) a priori, no concept, of whatever kind, could render comprehensible the possibility of change, in other words, of a conjunction of contradictorily opposed predicates in one and the same object, for example, the presence of a thing in a place and the non-presence of the same thing thing in the same place. It is only in time that it is possible to meet with two contradictorily opposed determinations in one thing, that is, after each other... [Thus] time is nothing else than the form of the internal sense, that is, of the intuitions of ourselves and of our internal state... Time, therefore, is not to be regarded as an object, but as the mode of representation of myself as an object.
-Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Doctrine of Elements, II.§6-8, p.55-58
No comments:
Post a Comment