The illusory nature of time.
Time. Everyone obeys it. But it’s quite difficult to wrap your head around when you sit back and consider it on a philosophical level.
I’m considering it at the moment for two reasons.
1. I just read Nietzsche’s little epistle ‘Of the land of culture’ in Thus Spoke Zarathustra where he says (and beautifully I might add) ‘I flew too far into the future: a horror assailed me. And when I looked around, behold! Time was my only contemporary.’
2. I’m watching the minutes tick by while a good friend of mine sleeps, you see, it’s 5:30am on Saturday morning where he is, and for me (to borrow from Heidegger) being-in-time, it’s 8:30pm on Saturday night.
So I’m kicking back in bed, I haven’t even got dressed today (real classy of me) with a copy of Nietzsche open next to me and my eyes glued to the clock and I’m trying to make sense of time.
Time is so tied up with everything we do, it’s a ‘universal’ law that we imposed on the universe. Yet we consider it something so reverent and immutable, something we all have to live by. And we do have to live by it, humanity has to live by the laws it creates until it creates new ones (Thus spoke Zarathustra, yeah I know. Thanks Nietzsche.)
But it baffles me, and this is why;
Because the slow procession of ages which wears down a mountain is nothing like the minutes which fly by dutifully and orderly to keep us aware of how many hours the sun shines for, and how many hours we spend in the moons domain. Did we impose this order on time? Does it resent us for it? Would it rather be thought of us a more primordial, chaotic force? (I’m well aware of the fact that time probably doesn’t think at all. Don’t worry, I’m not quite mad yet.)
I’m watching the sun set here, and the earth has rotated and the sun is rising where my dear friend is sleeping. Of course, that’s just the way it is, I can rationalize my confusion away with loads of empircal evidence. But on some level, I still can’t wrap my head around it. Maybe it’s because I spend my time communicating with people on the opposite side of the world, without really considering the huge gap which exists between our respective realities. Or maybe it’s because I’m just in the horrible habit of over-analyzing every aspect of life and I’m looking for some meaning of time which isn’t really there.
In my head, grappling with my current train of thought, I keep coming back to Heidegger and what he taught me about being-in-time for Dasein. My sense of time is mine, and I impose it onto others, even when I know that there sense of time has to be different because of their geographical location. But my sense of time is all I have to understand the world around me right? And even if I shifted myself (and I gladly would now, and will when the time comes) to where my friend lays asleep right now, my sense of time won’t change. I’ll have the same sense of time, I’ll exist in time the same way I do now.
“The existential and ontological constitution of the totality of Dasein is grounded in temporality… Is there a way leading from primordial time to the meaning of being? Does time itself reveal itself as the horizon of being?”
I don’t know Martin. You tell me! I’ll be right here pondering it when you reach your conclusion.
