Temporality

The only possible method for studying temporality is to approach it as a totality that dominates its secondary structures, and confers their meaning. Moreover, popular consciousness finds it so hard to deny any real existence to the past that, at the same time as allowing this first thesis, it also allows another equally imprecise conception, according to which the past has a sort of honorary existence. The examples cited by Chevalier in support of his thesis and, in particular, the facts of hysteresis do not succeed in establishing that some matter&s;s past can act on its present state. However, at the first blow one of them sinks straight into the partition and the other becomes twisted again: the action of the past. The crux of the question lies obviously in the term ‘was’, which, acting as an intermediary between the present and the past, is itself neither wholly present nor wholly past.

Epistemology · Temporality · Humanities and Social Sciences · Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy · Philosophy · Walter Benjamin Studies Compilation