|
|
|
|
|
|
4.3. Temporality and 'Consumption' |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The Aristotelian definition of time is ''the amount of movement from before to after," and since antiquity time has implied the idea of succession; the Kantian analysis has established unequivocally that this idea must be associated with an idea of causality: "It is a necessary law of our sensibility and therefore a condition of all perception that preceding Time necessarily determines what follows."
1 This idea has been maintained even by relativistic physics, not in the study of the transcendental conditions of the perceptions, but in the definition of the nature of time in terms of cosmological objectivity, in such a way that time would appear as the order of causal chains. Reverting to these Einsteinian concepts, Reichenbach recently redefined the order of time as the order of causes, the order of open causal chains which we see verified in our universe, and the direction of time in terms of growing entropy (taking up in terms even of information theory the thermodynamic concept which had recurrently interested philosophers and which they adopted as their own in speaking of the irreversibility of time.2 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Before causally determines after, and the series of these determinations cannot be traced back, at least in our universe (according to the epistemological model that explains the world in which we live), but is irreversible. That other cosmological models can foresee other solutions to this problem is well known; but, in the sphere of our daily understanding of events (and, consequently, in the structural sphere of a narrative character), this concept of time is what permits us to move around and to recognize events and their directions. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Expressing themselves in other words, but always on the basis of the order of before and after and of the causality of the before on the after (emphasizing variously the determination of the before on the after), existentialism and phenomenology have shifted the problem of time into the sphere of the structures of subjectivity, and discussions about action, possibility, plan, and liberty have been based on time. Time as a structure of possibility is, in fact, the problem of our moving toward a future, having behind us a past, whether this past is seen as a block with respect to our freedom to plan (planning which forces us to choose necessarily what we have already been) or is understood as a basis of future possibilities and therefore possibilities of conserving or changing what has been, within certain limits of freedom, yet always within the terms of positive processes. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Sartre says that "the past is the ever-growing totality of the in-itself which we are." When I want to tend toward a possible future, I must be and cannot not be this past. My possibilities of choosing or not choosing a future depend upon acts already accomplished, and they constitute the |
|
|
|
|
|