I actually value my time

WHAT IS TIME?

“Believe it or not continually being inconsiderate of somebody’s time is not acceptable.” Break the habit it’s gotten old

But why is being inconsiderate of somebody’s time being inconsiderate in the first place? Presupposed is the nature of time itself, but what is it? In my view the Bitcher has made a common mistake, that of identifying time as a commodity, something which has exchange value. In our pragmatic age this is not surprising but such a view fails to engage the nature of time itself. It reduces to something one uses rather than engaging that which is constitutive of one’s identity. In that sense, two possibilities present themselves as to the nature of time, the objective and the subjective views of time.

Objective time is time viewed from without, that of an extended period in which all organisms, ourselves included, come into and pass out of existence. We are all born and we all die. It’s just a matter of time (a little joke there). Objective time is measured in minutes on the clock, the months on a calendar, and the years on our birthdays. But objective time is something “out there,” something which can be empirically measured and as such lacks philosophical interest. It is the nature of subjective time which is anomalous.

Subjective time is the temporal dimension in which we live. We cannot transcend our subjective time, our temporal dimension, any more than we can transcend our subjective space, our spatial dimension. We are locked in the space-time continuum. So what can be said about the subjective nature of time?

We know that we have a past – indeed, some say that our past constitutes our identity. If we did not have a past we would be nobody. There is something to this but not, I believe, everything. However, there is one thing one can say about the past and that is that it is irretrievably gone, never to return. We have memories it is true but the reality of our past is gone. Our past, in that sense, is a foreign country even to ourselves.

Similarly we know that we have a future, other things being equal. However long that future may be we do not know. We can say that if the past is gone and finished, the future is “not yet.” It has the quality of possibility but also of contjngency. It is contingent on factors over which we have no control. We just don’t know what the future holds.

Then there is the present which is even more puzzling. Some say that the present doesn’t actually exist since by the time one realizes that the present is actually present, it has become the past. Some say that there is something called the “specious present” meaning that the present is not marked off in instants but rather in meaningful episodes. My typing this comment, for example, can be said to belong to the present although its beginning has already slipped into the past.

But if typing this comment is a meaningful episode in my present time, it suggests that one’s identity is more a matter of one’s creative endeavours – if one can call typing a comment on Bitch a “creative endeavour” – than simply being a product of my past time as indicated above. In that sense one’s identity is more a matter of current reflective activity than one passed on by simple inheritance from the past. It is an achievement.

Of course, all this has very little to do with the bitch narrowly conceived. But it doesn’t matter since the bitcher still loves the guy and that’s all that matters.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

A pleasure as always.

Cheerio!