KARL JASPERS FORUM

Short Note 36 (Responses to N35)

( TIME AND NOW )

Responses

by Greg Nixon, Alain Chouinard, Glenn C Wood

Posted 28 May 2002

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<A>

by Greg Nixon

21 May 2002

<A1>

I perhaps could add to your understanding of the "now" & of experience, but why ? I think you've nailed the centre of the target (even if, like all absolute centres, it turns out be a black hole or 0 zpg). How fine to read someone who sees without either limiting his vision by scientism or inflating it by projecting favorite speculations. Right: For those who say there is no now, only ongoing process (e.g., Whitehead, though his cosmology is always open to interpretation) or nontime geometrodynamics (Einstein's "block" spacetime), one need only reply that there could be *only* the present; the "other times" are the world-creation of animate experience. (But that does not make such out-of-present experience "unreal" since experience is always its own lived reality [dasein, in Heidegger] & thus not deniable from the outside.)

As I wrote recently to Tom Benjamin on JCS-OL:

<A2>

"Of course there is an actual present, just as there are 'things in themselves' out there (as we say) before being edited, reshaped, & readied for transmission by a species' & individual 'modelmakers'. (But it probably ain't 'out there' any more than 'in here' & it probably is beyond being called 'things' or 'it' or 'is'.) The actual present would be w/o qualities, as such, since this infinitely dynamic present has not yet been filtered, focussed, & limited by the modelmaking processes of the multivarious perceptual organs (or, for humans, by the laborious processes of cognitive recognition & anticipation). (In a paradoxical sense, the actual present would be everpresent, underlaying all experienced time-delayed presents, so, if one dares to admit it, actual present = eternity.)"

<A3>

Of course, my statement that the actual (eternal) present is beyond being referred to by "it is" will only confuse, anger, or be dismissed by readers. But, as you stated, the actual present could have no qualities whatsoever, so it is questionable whether we (from our perspective) should even grant it the primal quality of *existence*. "It" is neither an entity, as such, nor is it possible to grant the verb of being to it. In fact, the actual, dynamic, infinitely potent, *now* may be the "essence" that existence metamorphoses into being; after all, *existence* = "ex-essence", or "out of the essence".

[Root of "existance" is "...istance," related to the old Greek "histanai" = "still" or "motionless"; *Histanai* is also the root of "ecstasy", i.e., "out of stillness," thus also "out of essence".]

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<A4>

[Greg Nixon, from JSC-OL 1996,:]

Surely I am not the first to conceive of the notion that the "now" we experience on a daily basis is a constructed now -- a product, in fact, of consciousness. There is real "now", of course, in fact that is all there is. By definition, such a "now" can only be identified with eternity, the "now" of the eternal return. Our lived "now", however, is somewhat in a time-delay from that eternal (actual) present of sheer energy reactions and I would suggest that is because we live somewhat through memory. The constructed self of language restricts us from the immediacy of experience in the penultimate present.

<A5>

As Heidegger has written, "for the most part we *are* our own having-been" (1927 lecture "ein eigener positiv ekstatischer Modus der Zeitlichkeit"). This present-pastness is the time of our personhood-in-the-world. To enter the actual present in nonselfconscious awareness is an experience both of anamnesis and forgetting, as Heidegger puts it: "The ecstasis of forgetting something has the character of disengagement vis-a-vis one's ownmost having-been, indeed in such a way that this disengagement-in-the-face-of closes off what it faces. Because forgetting closes off having-been--such is the peculiar nature of that ecstasis--it closes off itself to itself." ["Ecstasis" means more than rapture, of course, implying as it does, spontaneous emergence out of place (histanai) or out of time (stasis).]

<A6>

In our habitual reality, even our perceptions are not immediate, delayed as they are through such re-cognition. (Experiments by Libet and others give some empirical credence to this notion.) We ex-ist in instant-replay.

Our "lived reality" (Husserl) or our "dasein" (Heidegger) or our "duration" (Bergson) or our "habitus" (alchemy) is a continuum of remembered past and anticipated future. We may well live in this continuum, forever held back from the actual present, which "remains" anticipated but always deferred.

In this sense, we always already "live in the past" and "life [really] is what happens when you're planning something else."

<A7>

An old question: "What *is* or what is 'happening' at so-called light-speed?"

A quotation from an article of my own fits well here too, I think (even though reasoning here stretches the bounds of conventional logic):

"Something must be manifest in Ñ or as Ñ the universe to be any thing. If it is beyond all qualities, especially space and time, it does not exist. We can only be conscious of or know of that which exists. We know and can know nothing objectively of unmanifest creative potential or of a God who is beyond existence.

"On the other hand, negative conceptions provide a way to indicate potential existence by pointing to what is not. In created spacetime, where indeed can the true void Ñ absolute nothingness or vacuum Ñ be found? Science writer F. David Peat reveals that our conceptual ÒnothingÓ is not quite what it linguistically implies: 'The vacuum state is the void. It is pure silence. But it is also a bubbling sea in which elementary particles are constantly dancing in and out of existence' (2000, p. 94). Even more unsettling, the potential energy in this void is as unlimited as creativity itself: 'It turns out that the energy within one cubic centimeter of the vacuum state would vastly exceed the energy content of our entire universe. . . . So this void, this nothingness, this cosmic silence, is pure potential' (p. 96)."

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REFERENCES

Nixon, Greg (2002). "Hollows of Experience". In review.

Peat, F. David (2000). *The Blackwinged Night : Creativity in Nature and Mind*. Cambridge MA: Perseus/Helix.

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Greg Nixon

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<B>

by Alain Chouinard :

21 May 2002

In relation to the time (in your paper N35), could you somehow somewhat and sometime, write a bit about your view on movement. It may help me on debugging, demystifying and demythifying this "subjective" concept or impression that there is movement, or that there is no real movement. ... Beauty is often still !

Movement, to me, now, being linked to being:

- (center of mind ... toward ... outside the "as if m.i.r."), or

- (inmost impression versus conscience of a less inmost), or

- mind versus a body I can see and touch.

All of these impressions involving a movement "inside" --- to --- "as outside". Or a "as movement" between "being out of existence" (therefore being fully aware-conscious) and "playing existence" (as in thinking ...).

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Alain Chouinard

Nunavut

e-mail <AChouinard@gov.nu.ca>

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<C>

by Glenn C. Wood

22 May 2002

<C1>

Appreciated the posting of time and now. Personally ... not knowing ... I'd hesitate to dogmatically declare that the center itself, or that which is not reducible to something else, is wholly not structured actually or potentially. An ontology can be more or less fixed or chaotic and the meaning given the word "time" doesn't remove the uncertainty or limitation of knowing. It seems suspiciously presumptive. I wonder if these structures based on experience which is based in the "center" are supposed to be the structures without referents?

<C2>

Because it's hard not to become religious in our wishes, if we think the center of experience is not structured, then we will probably conjure and expect mass assent to a traditional structured kingdom of God on earth to provide a traditional infallible guide for erring structures which come from the void of nothing. The alternative is to continue believing – independently -- there's a structure beyond and above our structures and continue hoping and preparing for the kingdom to come while enduring some abusive kingdoms. There is a tendency on the part of large institutional churches to talk about the church as the Kingdom of God on earth while contrary to such claims there's no such absolute Biblical concept. There's a faith, hope, and love center though and a non-centralized kingdom idea.

<C3>

There seems to be something familiar with considering the center as unstructured to the point there is no tortoise-handle to grasp for conceptual thinking except a negative or missed one -- unless one's earlier experiences involves remembering things like a preexisting structured sewing machine's painful needle. Jaspers could say we can only predict the negative, except Jaspers is talking out of experience with regard to predictions. We don't assume absolute structure or unstructure in the center of our world and prepare accordingly, but prepare for the rainy days based on limited experienced structures when the center of experience seems to modify but we don't really know how far the deviations from structure penetrate into the centerless center.

<C4>

We can't avoid the two psychological approaches to the negative, or one end of time. One view is that we are constantly motivated in life to avoid death. The other that we are constantly motivated in life to seek life but not by avoiding death at all cost. These psychological forms apply to death -- another word for uncertainty -- as well as the center of experience which is also uncertainty.

<C5>

The more remote center is neither structured nor unstructured except in the judgement of authorities with the power to impose -- as in some quest for power -- or as free individuals might make room for a healthy faith while stepping into uncertain frontiers.

<C6>

Time is a sign but the arrow I'd make of it would describe the way of handling the experience of a deer relative to the hunter relative to needs, while predicting the way of avoiding missing the target and hitting-or-missing the Ice Man under calm or windy conditions (The Ice Man apparently died of an arrow wound in the back). The hunter predicts missing and aims at the target. We can easily predict Armageddon but aim to prevent it unless we've succumbed to some unavoidable assumed chaos in the center of the will of God.

<C7>

I feel we could still be beguiled by "time" that "flows" to where "Now" becomes an assumed unstructured chaos justified by an idea that can become fixed or subjectively assumed as representative of an objective continuum - flow - inversely imaged. The word "flows" seems arbitrary too.

<C8>

It seems healthy though to treat "time" as something that has become a largely subjective structure. Placing its origin in experience and the distinct ground which is defined as necessarily unstructured seems a little off balance. Perhaps it's best to leave this matter as a short note "35" and leave it suspended until we see where this is leading, while remembering there's a very early concept of a "center" which ... became ... chaotic by comparison, and then restructured.

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Glenn C. Wood

e-mail <gwood@zianet.com>