ABSTRACT

What is time? Like many of the more fundamental concepts which we use to understand the world (art, Being, ritual, ‘the social’), time appears to be selfevident. However, any attempt to clarify and schematise our ordinary everyday understanding of time appears to be fraught with difficulties (see Lewis 1980, 9-10, on the problems of terms which we customarily use but find difficult to define). In such circumstances, it is often the case that the more satisfactory definitions are counter-intuitive, and themselves help us to recognise why a particular understanding of a phenomenon has arisen. Those depictions of time which have attempted to elaborate upon the way that it is experienced by human beings, and have thereby moved on to general philosophical statements, have often found themselves in severe difficulties. A case in point would be Immanuel Kant, who, in his ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’ (1901) attempted an inventory of the grounds which underlay the human perception of phenomena. That is to say, Kant was striving to set out the logical preconditions for our experience of the world. Within this scheme of things, time and space were considered as a priori categories. Neither time nor space could be directly experienced in themselves, yet no other phenomenon could be experienced without postulating their existence. That we do have a sensible awareness of phenomena demonstrates the reality of time and space, yet this recognition is an intuitive one. Since they logically precede anything which can be encountered as sense evidence, there is no way in which their existence can be tested or falsified empirically. So time and space are objective, yet are never known as such (Ricoeur 1988, 23). Moreover, time is linear, and consequently different times do not exist alongside each other: they must constitute a unified sequence.