ABSTRACT
The concept of time, like almost everything else, has fallen foul of the deep dualisms that have riven western thinking. 1 Natural Time is the universal clock, ticking away down the years, centuries and millennia within which events are measured while Cultural Time is how different societies in the past and present mark or represent time: their calendars, festivals, routines, myths and histories. Natural science gives us natural time, while social science and the humanities chart the multifarious ways different cultures have expressed this natural time. Time is, on the one hand, an objective property of the physical world; on the other, a subjective experience of human mind. Physical time and felt time. One might go on listing the permutations of this essential dualism but I think these preliminary remarks will make my point. Indeed, in my prologue I recounted how such dichotomies framed my earlier work on time. To some extent this was almost implicit, an accepted assumption which led me to reject or re-interpret everything on one side of this dichotomy (natural/physical time) in favour of the other (cultural/felt time). Yet in another sense, I was acutely aware of this dichotomy and, through the work of philosopher Paul Ricoeur, saw it as an inevitable tension, what Ricoeur called the aporias of time. Ricoeur’s solution was to posit a third time – narrative time – with which to bridge the dualism between what he called cosmological and phenomenological time and I have been both enamoured and dissatisfied by his solution ever since. I will return to Ricoeur in a later chapter but I mention him here because in many ways, it is impossible to tackle this dualism without invoking philosophy.
