Abstract
Speaking about time is difficult. Even Augustine, a former professor of oratory, begins his account of time with a sigh of despair: “Quid est enim ‘tempus’? Si nemo ex me quaerat, scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio.”1 Where does this difficulty come from? In the first place surely because speaking about time is itself temporal, that is, it presupposes and requires time. One cannot make time the object of an abstract study because one cannot raise oneself above time, cannot take up a place from where one could observe time sub specie aeternitas. A second difficulty, to which Augustine also alludes, has to do with a necessary connection between time and forgetting. Knowing presupposes retention and recognition, while time is something that passes away, disappears, never to return. Indeed, the advance of time not only makes us forget our previous experiences, time also makes us forget time itself Even and precisely when we succeed in remembering something from the past, we continue to forget time. Even when we take time in hand, relate it to the acts and aims of our life and thus set time into a personal story, time slips away from us.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Confessions, lib. XI, cap. 14: “What, then, is time? I know well enough what it is provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain it, I am baffled.”
Bibliography: G.W. Hegel, Introduction to the History of Philosophy (New York: Dover, 1956);
M. Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978);
E. Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991);
E. Levinas, Time and the Other (and additional essays) (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1994);
E. Levinas, Totality and Infinity; An Essay on Exteriority (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1979).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1998 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bernet, R. (1998). My Time and the Time of the Other. In: Zahavi, D. (eds) Self-Awareness, Temporality, and Alterity. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 34. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9078-5_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9078-5_8
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-5031-1
Online ISBN: 978-94-015-9078-5
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive