ABSTRACT
From the point of view twentieth-century phenomenology, our understanding of time must begin with an account of our lived experience of it. It is in the practical domain that our confrontation with time is most pronounced, and so it is not surprising that for many of the thinkers working within the phenomenological tradition there is an intimate link between our experience of time and our experience of ourselves as agents. In the work of Bergson, for instance, only free agents—beings whose futures are fundamentally indeterminate—demand to be thought of in distinctively temporal terms. A purely deterministic world would make time ontologically superfluous, on Bergson’s account, for all future events would be already implied in what is present, and all past events would be simply irrelevant insofar as they no longer had any determinative, causal force in their own right. In contrast, our existence as free agents must be conceived in terms of a continuous temporal duration whereby the past is not simply over and done with, but is prolonged and made effective in the present course of action precisely through the agent’s retention of it in memory; moreover, even the future shapes the character of the agent’s present, for on Bergson’s account, we only ever perceive that portion of the present world that aligns with the range of possible actions that we anticipate performing in it. 1 In the thought of Sartre the link between freedom and the experience of time is likewise brought to the forefront, for on his account it is precisely our basic experience of freedom that introduces a genuine negation into the fabric of being, and as such we as agents become the basic ground of such negative phenomena as “not yet” and “no longer,” phenomena that are essential to the experience of time. 2 Even the basic Husserlian notion that our perceptual experience of the present is essentially encompassed by a horizon of potential further experiences seems to recognize a special connection between time and agency. For the horizon of potential experiences consists essentially in an anticipation of a not yet determined future, and our very openness to this future seems to be grounded in an experience of an “I can.” 3 The experience of freedom and our experience of time, it seems, are intertwined in a fundamental way in such accounts.
