PRESENT IMPERATIVE: Ethics and Temporality

PRESENT IMPERATIVE: Ethics and TemporalityAuthor(s): Robert GibbsSource: Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 76, No. 1 (Spring 1993), pp. 163-172Published by: Penn State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41178625 .

Accessed: 10/06/2014 21:27

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Penn State University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Soundings:An Interdisciplinary Journal.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 91.229.248.181 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 21:27:02 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=psup

http://www.jstor.org/stable/41178625?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


PRESENT IMPERATIVE: Ethics and Temporality

Robert Gibbs

Jewish philosophy not only arises in a context of non-Jewish ^ philosophy, but it also can maintain a constructive dialogue with such philosophy. My task here is both to locate a Jewish philosophic interpretation of temporality amidst a more general contemporary philosophic spectrum and also to negotiate the differences from this general position. My question, put most simply, is how are we able to experience time? or what is the nature of temporality? I will sketch three concepts of time: 1) the inner flow of consciousness, 2) the existential confronta- tion with my own finitude, and 3) the interruption of the other person's face in my world. These alternatives correspond to Husserl, to Heidegger, and to Levinas. But I will then repeat my sequence of thinkers looking at the changing ways of study- ing time, as phenomenology is displaced. This second sequence, of methods, will help us to see both the critical and constructive relation of Levinas with non-Jewish philosophers. Finally, in the sequence of method, the work of Rosenzweig appears as fundamental for Levinas, but Rosenzweig's appearance forces the sequence of ideas one step further, into theology. He offers us a glimpse into the theological correlation to the intersubjectivity Levinas proposes. The origin of temporality becomes not only intersubjective, but ultimately, theological.

Three Different Claims About Temporality

How can we account for our temporality - that we live in time and that the time we experience has a specific shape? The

Robert Gibbs is Assistant Professor of Religion at Princeton University.

Soundings 76.1 (Spring 1993). ISSN 0038-1861.



164 SOUNDINGS Robert Gibbs

Newtonian model of time, one which "works" in our everyday life, regards each moment as uniform. Time is a string of ho- mogenous distinct "nows," like frames of a movie. Through- out this discussion I will emphasize the problem of our relationship to the past. Along this uniform string of discrete moments the past is simply gone. But the past we live and experience remains with us, and it suffers certain sorts of com- pression and certain sorts of expansion, as some moments linger in our experience longer than others. The past appears in our present as past - not as just like now except gone, but gone in a different way. Time is distended, stretched out, and that uniform sequence of discrete "nows" does not in itself seem to offer much insight into that distension.

Claim #7. Time First Is Distended Consciousness

The first claim is that temporality first happens in consciousness, and that only internal time consciousness makes possible the objective time of the world. This move follows Husserl's phenomenological reduction, ignoring the questions about objective time by looking at how I experience that time. This de- tour from objective time will display internal time consciousness as a transcendental condition for external time consciousness, and from there it becomes quite another matter to deal with external time itself (with the objective time of the world).

One of Husserl's favorite examples, music, will clarify the three stages. Imagine that you are hearing a Beethoven piano sonata. A claim about objective time would be that it was play- ing at 9:10 am, on Sunday, November 18. A claim about external time consciousness is that I heard the melody. A claim about internal time consciousness is that I was aware of the song - that the song played in my head, as it were. When I hear the song (external), I hear not just a sequence of notes, but I hear the melody, the connection of the notes, together. However, the melody itself is distended, it takes time. Without the connection and displacement (the one note is heard after, that is when the other note has stopped sounding), there is no melody. What is heard must be temporal, otherwise there is no music. Thus I retain in my consciousness the notes that went before, and that is what makes the melody be heard. We need



Present Imperative: Ethics and Temporality 165

to distinguish retention and memory - that is, representation. While I hear the melody, I retain the sounds that went before. They are continuous with the present. But if I remember a tune, then I recall the linked sequence, the melody, into a new present.

While we see that external time consciousness depends on temporality, we still need to make another move - because that temporality is not presented in a unitary moment of internal consciousness. It takes time to think of the time a song takes. The time it takes is the internal temporality. Just as the melody is distended, so the perception of the melody is distended. In- deed, Husserl's argument is that were the perception itself not distended, it would be impossible to hear the distension of the melody. Here the virtue of the phenomenological reduction appears: by avoiding concern about objective time, we can discover that time must lie transcendentally within the structure of internal consciousness itself. From here, the way is open to a reconstruction of the intentionality of that consciousness in relation to the objective world. The intentionality which retains the heard sounds of a second before, which provides the basis for the heard melody, aims at the very objective melody which we bracketed. Precisely because Husserl discovered the inner distension, the time it takes to perceive a melody, he can measure the perception as similary distended. The root of the experience, and even of our judgements about objective time, is the temporality of internal time consciousness.

Claim #2. Ontology: That Being Is Distended Temporally

Heidegger shifts the discussion towards the claim that objective time depends on the very distension of human being. This shift emerges as a critique of Husserl's emphasis on consciousness. Like Husserl, Heidegger rejects the sequence of discrete uniform "nows." But Husserl still uses the present moment as the focus of his interpretation. The retention "makes present" the just past - and only as a sort of present, only as retained within a present is it available to consciousness. Even with the distension of consciousness, Husserl remained wed to the primacy of the present (even if distended). Heidegger discovered that the relation of past and future is altogether different.




Heidegger's shift is to look at how a person exists in the world. The ontological (as opposed to conscious) structures of a human being are the root of even the temporality of consciousness. Normally one does not relate to one's own being authentically - in existential concord or appropriateness. But I will limit my presentation of Heidegger here to the authentic mode of temporality. The focus, then, is on my own finitude, my own mortality. I may anticipate my own death with resolution - not merely with passive acceptance. I can will my own destiny, my own finitude. (Normally, inauthentically, I tend to ignore and even deny that I am going to die). But this fundamental fact about my being, that I will cease to be, that I am even now not immortal, is the key to being true to myself. The relation to this future, my own death, is the central aspect of temporality. The present is displaced by the future in Heideg- ger's analysis, as I must either will my being towards death, or flee and disregard that unique being which is my own death.

The past, in the authentic mode, is one of recalling and ap- propriating what has already made me what I am. My situation is not under my control, rather I am under it. My past is not my own choosing. Still, I have the choice of pretending that my past has not formed me, or I can remember it and re-form it, calling myself back to my own history. I can carry my past to the future through an authentic act of remembering.

Finally, the present moment serves only as a bridge for de- ciding, a bridge from the past that I did not choose (my birth) to a future that I need to choose, to anticipate resolutely (my death). In the present I am called out of my inauthentic life, where I try to forget my mortality and ignore my own situated- ness. This moment is a withdrawal from the world - where the life of ignoring and avoiding reign - back into my own self. This call is, according to Heidegger, the call of conscience, and it is silent. It avoids the language of the world - which is at best ambiguous and often dedicated to avoiding and ignoring. It is a kind of ecstasy, a standing out, a change in my way of being. And indeed temporality itself is a kind of ecstasy - where I discover that to be my self is to live for my death, to relate myself to my own future. This resolution toward death, with its remembering of the past and the decisive moment of the present, is the fundamental temporality of our lives. Temporality is the




structure of my being, and only because of that is it possible to have both the consciousness of time and the objectivity of sci- entific time. The authentic relation to temporality is the origin of our inauthentic way of being (of fleeing death and forgetting the past), which produces the image of time as sequence of uniform discrete "now"s. Only because our being is to be towards our own death and as thrown into this world (born) is either the consciousness of time or the construction of objective time possible.

Claim #3. Ethics: Intersubjective Obligation Is Distended

Emmanuel Levinas claims that the transcendental origin of temporality is neither consciosuness nor ontology but is rather in ter subjectivity - the face of the other. He criticises Heideg- ger as representative of the ontological tradition in philosophy. Levinas sees the preference for ontology as a program for as- similating reality to the ego. I overcome other things by appro- priating them, by eating them, by finding a place for them in my world. The intellectual task of ontology is to find out how everything can be assimilated to my being. By making human being the measure of reality, I force whatever can be real to lie within the grasp of my intellect. This applies to our experience of time: because we can present, re-present, retain, and so on, the past precisely by making it present to us. The power of my self to make all of time synchronous, unified into a story that I then can tell, that power is the assimilative, imperialistic power of the self. Even my own death can become part of my story (or as Heidegger claims, the center of my story). Authenticity, as being truest to my self, must assimilate to myself whatever I encounter, even my own mortality.

But there is a temporality which disrupts the synchronicity of the narrator. Notice again that the time it takes to narrate (Husserl's internal time consciousness) itself does not overcome the primacy of the self and its control of time. Nor does the insistence on the finitude of the story in its beginning and its end escape assimilation. What does disrupt my story-telling is the other person. For the other interrupts my story with a demand upon me, and that demand is the real present - a present which is not representable, but which is so urgent that it is right now. Here is the failure of my assimilatory desire, be-




cause the other is free and I cannot determine the other's will. Here the intentionality towards an object is inverted as the other has intentions towards me. Not my eye sees her, but she sees me; not my hand grasps the object, but the other's hand reaches out to me. The moment of demand, which renders me passive, is a moment of such urgency that I must do first and think after - the duty precedes reflection.

This urgent present, in contrast to Heidegger's call of conscience, does not pull me out of the world, but turns me around to answer for the world. My construction of the world, even were it an authentic life, is put in question by the poverty of the other. My representation and synthesis of the world is interrupted - without hope of repair - and I must account for myself to the other. My story about the past is interrupted in such a way that I discover that there is something which hap- pened, indeed which happens, without ever being assimilable or narratable. While Heidegger struggles to remember the past into which I was thrown, Levinas suggests that there is a past more past than any memory, a past which could never be remembered, a past which never was present. This past, which I call the deep past, is the moment in which I received responsibility for the other. The passivity of responsibility appears in temporality precisely as the never having been present of that past. The utter frustration of time consciousness and of existential ontology, this past of which there is only a trace and never a story, never a retention much less a representation, which I in no way intended - this is the past of the responsibility for others.

The objectivity of the past, thus, is established in utter freedom from thought, experience, even ontology, because I cannot control or intend this past which is gone without ever having been present. My responsibility rests upon me, I must respond, without having the power to assimilate that duty. The distension of the past from the present becomes objective and radical precisely in order to ensure the responsibility, and so ethics becomes the key to temporality. The past is different from the present because we are bound to help others. Whereas my ability to synchronise time is only my ability to assimilate and conquer the world and its differences, the




other's freedom is made secure by the distance between the past and the present.

II. Phenomenology's Tracks

This sequence of ideas (consciousness, being, and ethics) is parallel to a methodological sequence because the way we think about temporality is bound to what we think it is. First, we cannot help noticing that the three thinkers are phenomenologists. At the same time, Heidegger and Levinas both clearly step out from the careful examination of consciousness and Husserlian phenemonology. If their interest in phenomenology is not merely a biographical fluke, that they studied with Husserl, there must be some reason why they retain the ambiguous relationship that they do, instead of simply abandoning it. In the limited context of temporality, I think we may gain some insight. For time seems, as Husserl claimed, to have a strong claim to being the very core of consciousness. Levinas recog- nizes that Husserl showed that all representational thought de- pended on the temporality of consciousness. The fundamental rhythm of consciousness, its essential structure, is the distension of thought. Husserl chooses music as his example because music is the idealisation of time. The strength of the phenomenological method is that it captures the core of consciousness by focusing on time - but it does not get us into time.

What ultimately secures our temporality is something which cannot appear as a phenomenon. Heidegger notices this in his claim for death - the non-appearance without return. He stays with phenomenology because the relationship to death can appear. The gap between my way of being towards my death and my death itself is a gap which allows phenomenology still to guide Heidegger's analyses. Heidegger backs off from this excess beyond consciousness by making a call of conscience the decisive moment, as a call which has only inward dimension, but here the very ambiguity of phenomenology returns so forcefully.

However, when we turn to Levinas, then we exceed phenom- ena in a different way, because the other cannot become a phenomenon for me. Because the other is free and has intentions towards me, the other's otherness evades my intentionality. The excess here, the infinity of responsibility, shatters the rule




of the ego's intentionality. In place of retention as intentionality, we see only a trace of the past, a non-phenomenality which appears only in the action between the other and me, and which crystalises into being as it loses its excess.

The correlation of being and intentionality is fractured by the other's demand. The face is not a phenomenon but is an enigma. It can be reduced to phenomenon, but at the same time the face winks and avoids my intention. The enigmatic itself is a trace of the past which cannot appear. Phenomenol- ogy can both illuminate the being, the phenomenality of the other, and more subtly it can call attention to the absence, to the trace as absent past. Phenomenology, like late Idealism, offers a negative function, allowing us to absolve phenomenality from intersubjectivity, from the moment of responsibility, from the temporality of the urgent present, from the imperative.

Levinas's interpretation of the imperative depends on a certain sort of pragmatics. While phenomenology cannot register the scope of the imperative, semiotics or pragmatics (of some sort or other) focuses precisely on that dimension. At this point, the other philosophical resources of Levinas come into play. Levinas has acknowledged his great debt to Franz Rosen- zweig, who made important use of the switch from thought to spoken speech. Rosenzweig called this aspect of his work "grammatical thinking," and in it he explored the structures of relationships between separate free persons. Speech then be- came something performed between a speaker and a listener. Rosenzweig claimed that speech found its radical function in revealing the hidden self to an other. That revelation was an urgent command, a demand made upon me by the other speaking. In relation to Levinas' sense of temporality, Rosenzweig offers insight both into narratable time (with the tenses of speech), and also to the deep past, which precedes the disclos- ing performances of speaking. Temporality is ultimately that of people talking, of listening and of being bound to answer, to respond to the other. But the move that leads from the ego- center in idealism and phenomenology to the pragmatics of speech between the other and me is not simply replacement. Both Rosenzweig and Levinas retain the prior ego-centrism, in order to see the rupture which occurs in speaking.




But Rosenzweig also goads us to shift the concept of time again because that temporality of speaking in response is itself theological. The semiotic relations in time are bound to a semiotic of creation and revelation where the distension of our temporality reflects the distension in the relations between God and World and Humanity. The very processes of significa- tion and communication, which Rosenzweig shows to be sepa- rated temporally, reflect the distension in the creation, which is always past, from the revelation which is that urgent present of Levinas. Even the deep past, the past which never was present, finds its role in Rosenzweig's Star - again as the guarantor of our interlocutor's freedom. While Levinas hesitates to explore the theological dimension of temporality in speech, Rosen- zweig tightly binds together in ter subjective human speech with theological concepts. However, Rosenzweig also requires theology find its measure in philosophical thought and its confir- mation in social practice. The shift into a theological concept of time need not challenge Levinas' focus on ethics; rather it makes ethics itself something of transcendent exigency.

The displacement of phenomenology is far from complete in these two sequences, because the structure of consciousness itself reflects temporality - thus also reflecting the basic intersubjectivity of our being. We can locate both the idealism of listening to music as well as the tragedy of facing our own deaths within the larger context of our ethical responsibilities and the temporality which characterises that. Even the move to the theological concepts, the sense of a semiotic in creation linked to the fulfillment in redemption, even the deep past which was never present, all return to the pragmatic encounter with others. The fulcrum for the study of temporality, and for our human condition, even for theological reflection all center on that first moment when another makes a demand on us, calls us to account for our world, and reveals our urgent responsibility for that other, in that moment which is purely imperative and truly present.




WORKS OF RELATED INTEREST

Husserl, Edmund. Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1964.

Heidegger, Martin. Bang and Time. NY: Harper 8c Row, 1962. . "The Anaximander Fragment," Early Greek Thinking. NY: Harper 8c

Row, 1975. Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. The Hague: Marti-

nus Nijhoff, 1981. . Time and the Other. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987. Rosenzweig. The Star of Redemption. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971.



Date post:	12-Jan-2017
Category:	Documents
Upload:	robert-gibbs
View:	212 times
Download:	0 times

PRESENT IMPERATIVE: Ethics and Temporality

Documents