David Couzens Hoy - The Time of Our Lives

The Time of Our Lives

A Critical History of Temporality

David Couzens Hoy

The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England

2009 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hoy, David Couzens.

The time of our lives: a critical history of temporality / David Couzens Hoy.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-262-01304-5 (hc. : alk. paper)

1. TimePhilosophy. I. Title.

BD638.H585 2009

115dc22

2008035983

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 In Search of Lost Time: Kant and Heidegger

Kant on the Source of Time

Heideggers Reading of Kant

The Early Heidegger

Reflections

2 There Is No Time Like the Present! On the Now

Hegels Critique of the Now

William James and the Specious Present

Husserl on Time-Consciousness

Heidegger in Being and Time

Merleau-Ponty on Temporal Idealism

Derridas Critique of the Metaphysics of Presence

Nietzsche and Deleuze on Eternal Recurrence

Reflections

3 Where Does the Time Go? On the Past

Phenomenology of the Past

Memory and Memorialization

Twentieth-Century German Phenomenology

Twentieth-Century French Philosophy

Reflections

4 The Times They Are a-Changin : On the Future

Kant and Hegel on Universal History

Heidegger on the Futural

Walter Benjamins Angelus Novus

Deleuze on the Temporality of the Self

Derrida on Democracy-to-Come

iek on Bartleby Politics

Reflections

5 Le temps retrouv: Time Reconciled

Strategy 1 Remembering: Proust and Benjamin

Strategy 2 Interpretation: Heidegger and Hermeneutics

Strategy 3 Critique: Foucault, Derrida, and iek

Strategy 4 Dual Temporalization: Deleuze on Aion and Chronos

Closing Time

Genealogy and Critical Theory

Universalism

Genealogy and Phenomenology, Redux

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

This book is the first volume in a planned two-volume study of the history of consciousness. This volume represents a history of time-consciousness. The next volume, currently in progress, focuses on the history of self-consciousness. This order is itself a philosophical problem and it involves some crucial philosophical decisions. Some philosophers would expect the study of self-consciousness to come before the study of time-consciousness. These philosophers have intuitions formed by the Kantian and neo-Kantian tradition. According to this tradition, time is a form of intuition and is imposed by the mind on experience. Holders of this view might well expect, then, a theory of self-consciousness to come before (both logically and temporally) a theory of time-consciousness.

By starting with time-consciousness, this book challenges the logical ordering that puts mind before time. The thought that is being explored in the phenomenological tradition is that temporality is a condition for the possibility of subjectivity. The assumption that the reverse is the case must therefore not be taken for granted. Along the way, however, several other aspects of the Kantian tradition are also called into question. Among them is the very idea of something coming before something else. The transcendental program of showing the logically prior conditions for the possibility of experience in general is challenged here. Simply reversing the ordering of the relation of mind and time would not break with transcendental philosophy. To make that break, a thoroughly pragmatic or hermeneutical philosophy will have to give up the project of explaining which is the more primordial, mind or time, and which is derived. Furthermore, the very concepts, mind and time, must be problematized. Although they are not necessarily abandoned, the extent to which they surreptitiously carry with them much philosophical baggage should become clearer as this historical study of time- and self-consciousness unfolds. In this volume, the idea of time-consciousness itself is called into question right at the beginning. Whether it survives at the end or not, it undergoes conceptual transformations that might well make it unrecognizable to its most famous proponent, Edmund Husserl.

A subsidiary thesis of this book is that the history of philosophy can make a philosophical difference. The method of critical history, or genealogy, is intended to challenge predominant understandings of what the philosophical issues are supposed to be by shaking the foundations of philosophy and showing that philosophical concepts and issues are not fixed in stone forever. The thought that there are perennial problems of philosophy that have not changed is thus itself to be questioned. What philosophy itself is concerned with and how it has changed needs to be shown by a critical history of philosophical themes. This history has the potential to reveal and perhaps even to cause meaning changes, conceptual shifts, and even tectonic transformations in the overall philosophical landscape. If these studies contribute to those transformations even to a small extent, they will have served their purpose.

Acknowledgments

This first volume has been a long time in gestation, and its provenance is indebted to many people. First and foremost, I should acknowledge the metaphilosophical influence of my close friend, Richard Rorty, the time of whose life sadly came to an end on June 8, 2007, the day that this manuscript was completed in Paris. If I believed in a permanent philosophical pantheon, I would certainly argue for his preeminence in it. Although he did not thematize temporality, the ideas in this book would not have been possible without our many conversations.

Next I wish to acknowledge in-depth conversations with Burkhard Kmmerer, professor of mathematics and physics in Darmstadt, Germany. Although we have known each other since 1968, in the last decade he has helped me to understand much about the time of physics, even if this book is not about physical time as such. A gifted teacher, he made many things clear to me in ways that prevented major errors I might otherwise have made. Of course, errors that I do make are entirely on my own conscience. In any case, I hereby dedicate this book to the entire Kmmerer familyUrsula, Dorothea, Burkhard, Andrea, Matthias, Henrike, and Friederand in particular, to the memory of Dr. Emil Kmmerer.

I should also express my gratitude to the neuroscience faculty and staff of Stanford University, including Dr. Helen Bront-Stewart, Dr. Jaimie Henderson, Dr. Gary Heit, Wendy Cole, Kay McGuire, and all the members of their teams. Their combined efforts have added greatly to the quality not only of my life, but the lives of many others as well. Without their expertise, as well as that of Dr. Cathleen Miller and Dr. Josh Novic, there are three of my recent books that could not have been written: one in the past (Critical Resistance), the present one on the history of time-consciousness, and the history of self-consciousness that should appear in the near future.

My graduate students and academic colleagues in the departments of philosophy, history of consciousness, politics, anthropology, and literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have been a continual source of stimulation. Research on this project has been supported by funds that came with my appointments as Presidential Chair in Philosophy as well as Distinguished Professor of Humanities. Additional funding came through the Santa Cruz Institute for Humanities Research and the Committee on Research. MIT Press editor Tom Stone as well as his helpful readers were also crucially involved in the final transformations of the manuscript into the book.