About Time as Practice

We have many fragments from Democritus, a contemporary of Socrates and his student Plato, but none more famous than this: ‘By convention, sweet; by convention, bitter; by convention, hot; by convention, cold; by convention, color; but in reality, atoms and void.’ [1]

Within this single statement, two paths are open to philosophical thought. Western Metaphysics will follow one path: convention is illusion and atoms-and-void are real.

Time as Practice follows the other path: convention is just as real as atoms and void. Following this direction changes our very capacity for experience.

Henri Bergson took this other direction. He posed an experiential challenge that we have yet to fully grasp: ‘Let each of us undertake the experiment, let him give himself the direct vision of a change, of a movement; he [she, they] will have a feeling of absolute indivisibility.’[2]

His friend and fellow traveler, William James, posed the same challenge with ‘radical empiricism.’ ‘Experience itself, taken at large, can grow by its edges…. Life is in the transitions as much as in the terms connected.’ [3]

Michel Serres, who is a crucial figure for Time as Practice, pushed the challenge further: ‘Everything moves, even trees, in which sap circulates and whose foliage whirls in the north wind. Everything moves, even the molecules in the minutest cell. Everything lives from communicating. Everything exists from exchange. Relation conditions life and precedes existence’ [4]

To be sure, Newton saw motion as fundamental, but he preserved Western Metaphysics by making math into Aristotle’s unmoved mover: ‘And therefore our present work sets forth mathematical principles of natural philosophy. For the basic problem of philosophy seems to be to discover the forces of nature from the phenomena of motions and then to demonstrate the other phenomena from these forces.’ [5]

Seeing motion without requiring Aristotle’s unmoved mover is the path not taken by Western Metaphysics. When we take this alternative path, we broaden our perception by taking time, motion, and change seriously.

When we untether motion from its hidden unmoved mover, interesting things happen. Curiosity and humility take on new life together. We start to become aware of the blindnesses that James warned us of. Our precious certainties become brief habits, to borrow Nietzsche’s phrase. Conversations change from emotional assertions of truth to asking more genuine questions of each other. We stop formulating our retorts while we are (sort of) listening to our interlocutors. Most importantly, ressentiment cannot find fertile ground.

Time as Practice takes up this experiential challenge as aphorisms, essays, and meditations on how we compose time and expand experience. Hopefully, in the process we will find a way of opening up thinking and communicating that gets beyond the ressentiment-fueled combat that is pervasive today.

Trustees

Like Robert Harrison’s Entitled Opinions, Time as Practice has trustees — thinkers, like Bergson and James and Serres, who show us ways of perceiving the world without erecting philosophical, scientific, and religious systems. Such systems only invite ressentiment, competition, and factions. My intellectual trustees took time seriously, and in doing so treat human experience as radically expandable.

Who are the trustees of Time as Practice? They include Bergson, (durée), Nietzsche (Eternal Recurrence), William James (radical empiricism), Michel Serres (l’incandescence, le Grand Récit), Bruno Latour (modes of existence), René Girard (mimetic desire, scapegoating), Nagarjuna (emptiness, dependent conditioning), Keiji Nishitani (karma), Hans Blumenberg (secularization), Simone Weil (attention), Heidegger (Dasein, Mitsein), Montaigne (Essais), among many others. There will also be a fair mount of ancients who show up from time to time, including the usual suspects: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, some of the Stoics. But more importantly Heraclitus and (later) Lucretius who were thinking the problem of movement and change in ways that we seem to have lost.

About Greg Laugero

Back in 1995, I completed a dissertation called Infrastructures of Enlightenment. It focused on the wholesale transformation of the British landscape over the course of the eighteenth-century. The island was blanketed with turnpike trusts (leading to newly paved roads), printing presses, lending libraries, postal networks, newspapers, book advertisements, novels and romances, among other interlocking systems. In my way of thinking, the Enlightenment could be a moment in the history of Ideas only alongside a vast material transformation of the landscape — not only of that relatively small island nation, but of the entire imperialized world. You can read an adaptation of the first chapter on Jstor.org.

My career has largely been in the software industry, though what that means is difficult to pin down. Software is a meta-industry that has infused itself systematically into all industries. I’ve also spent a lot of time and effort serving on boards for nonprofit arts organizations in Colorado. In the intervening decades, I have sought to weave together all of these interests. Time Out of Joint and my blog, Time as Practice, are my current outlets for what I have to say on such matters.

Pace

Time as Practice does not have a pace. I will probably publish a handful of posts per year, so that I can take a deep dive into a single issues. The posts will be long because I’m not interested in discussing one topic at a time. That’s far too Cartesian for me.