Notes: Elie During (2016) Coexistence and the flow of time

pdf accessed 18 October 2020: https://www.academia.edu/24263177/DURING_Coexistence_and_the_Flow_of_Time_2016_

p. 1

Why do we need philosophy of time?

“If philosophizing about time is any worth, it is because we expect it
to shed some light on the real issues: for example, those concerning identity and
persistence, continuity and emergence. What would be the point of arguing about the
reality or ideality of time, if it did not change the way we relate to the world itself? Why
should we care about the meaning of “passage,” if it does not give us a better grip on the
underlying perplexities of becoming?”

“[…] time does not lend itself to scientific or philosophical inquiry as an objective natural property […] I believe one of Kant’s great achievements in that regard consisted in claiming with utmost vigor that “time” properly understood is not an object in any meaningful sense, but something like a formal intuition, or a second-order concept.“

p. 5

The form of time: a detour through Kant

Time is not a concept but a form; not a sensible datum but a pure intuition –> “time does not flow while everything flows within it” (A, 144)

not in the sense that it stands still. Rather in the sense that time is not the thing that may flow or not.

Time as form must not be confused with the temporal phenomena or processes unfolding in time.

p. 7-8

Time itself is no processes but the form of any process. It is a formal concept. What this means is that “time” is essentially the name of a problem, or a cluster of problems,
rather than a general denomination subsuming a class of particular objects (whether we call
these “durations” or “changes”). As a result, any particular figure of time calls for
philosophical interpretation, rather than direct application. Such an interpretation must be carried out according to the “demands” that the form of time makes on us. Following Kant’s characterization of the order of time in the “analogies of experience,” I would suggest that the “horizon of expectation” associated with time points to three major directions:
1° Duration (permanence), according to the category of substance
2° Order (succession), according to the category of causality
3° Coexistence (simultaneity), according to the category of community (or reciprocal
action)

1° and 2° are typical ingredients of the view of time as the dimension of change.

But equally important is the third aspect of time,
described under the heading of coexistence: time as a sheaf or envelope of becoming,
extending over space, holding together bundles of durations that may flow together, overlap or coexist at a distance, according to simultaneity relations that extend beyond the “herenow” of coincident events. 2° and 3°, taken together, raise the issue of time’s relation with the causal order as a whole.
My contention is that we cannot choose between these three profiles of time: they are
inseparable, they come as a package, and that is what makes of time, more than a relational
concept, a genuine structure of thought.

p. 9-11

Laplace’s ghost

This chapter critiques Laplace’s determinism. It discusses present past and future through Bergson’s Matter and Memory.

the present
does not flow because it is in the nature of time to do so, it does not pass by virtue of
conforming to an impersonal and abstract template of becoming “in general” (Creative
Evolution, 324). Bergson sometimes explains that the present passes because it is infused
with the past that “pushes” against it.

the present moment
contracts the whole past from its own, unsubstitutable perspective, as a result of the
interplay of memory and perception of that makes up the actual present. For a present
stripped from its concrete content is nothing but the empty form of awareness, or which
amounts to the same, the mere form of our activity or “attention to life”. In actual fact, to
perceive is to remember: the constitutive role of memory in the elaboration of perception is a central claim of Matter and Memory.

…in virtue of the form of time itself. The present draws the whole past with
itself and comes to be tainted by it. That is why no two presents can be identical: even if
their objective contents were in fact indiscernible, they would not carry the same amount of
past! That is why there is necessarily more to the present than to the past. Very simply: in
the present moment, there is the present plus the past! There is perception plus memory,
contracting the past from a particular perspective. And finally, that is why the future
cannot be simply read off the present, as if nothing was genuinely created in between

p. 14

What is it that passes?

…passage is an utterly inadequate metaphor. The past does not itself pass; it grows upon itself, allowing for the present to
pass, and thus for real change to occur. But for the present to pass really means that it is.

the indivisible continuity of change, the continuation of the past in the present, in short their
paradoxical coexistence, more essential than their depiction as a succession of distinct
states, now-present and then-past.

Once you have laid out the series of moments (infinitesimal instants or temporal spans) on a single ontological plane, you have committed yourself to the view that
time is merely the dimension of change—a dimension that only needs to be cut out or
punctuated in the appropriate way to yield all there is to be said about temporal matters.
And that, of course, is the original sin: “For our duration is not merely one instant replacing
another; if it were, there would never be anything but the present—no prolonging of the
past into the actual, no evolution, no concrete duration. Duration is the continuous progress
of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances.”

p. 15

The cinematographic illusion reconsidered

The stroboscopic view of becoming as a series of discontinuous instants derives from a deeper presupposition regarding the serial nature of the time dimension. On a different level, the cosmological cinematograph dreamt by the
metaphysician and the mathematician achieves the feat of bringing together a plurality of heterogeneous durations within a single global time. It does so by pitching them against a homogenous dimension that renders them commensurate, and most importantly enables them to share a single sense of simultaneity (at any rate, in the ideal Newtonian version).

…this is made possible by a cinematographic mechanism of thought
performing the extraction of a single, simple, impersonal and abstract representation of “becoming in general” out of the variety of concrete becomings (Creative Evolution, 324).
Such an indefinite, undetermined becoming is not the becoming of anything in particular: it
acts as the universal medium of change. I suggest we refer to it as “frame-time”.
Bergsonism is primarily a philosophy of
durations (in the plural), of the coexistence of durations. It challenges us to find a way of accounting for coexistence that does not rely on the abstract concept of simultaneity
introduced by frame-time.